


I Gave Them My Blood, I Give You My Heart

by bellepeppertronix



Category: The Shape of Water (2017)
Genre: And I will do it, Domestic Fluff, Fix-It, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, I don't know how I forgot that, I literally came here to wrest Dr. Dimitri Mosenkov from the bloody jaws of death, M/M, Male-Female Friendship, Mention of period-typical homophobia, Operation Free Zelda 2k18, also Brewster...must go...away..., everybody needs friends!, i might delete some of these tags later, let Dimitri be happy!, mention of period-typical cultural appropriation, mention of period-typical racism, mention of police violence, oh my gosh you guys stop leaving off his doctorate it makes him sad, some people need them more than others
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-02
Updated: 2018-06-04
Packaged: 2019-04-17 05:19:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 29,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14181651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellepeppertronix/pseuds/bellepeppertronix
Summary: What if Strickland and Dimitri's handlers shot each other? What if Strickland made it back to his car, mortally wounded? What if Dimitri, also seriously wounded, managed to get to Strickland's car, and then held Strickland's hand down, causing him to shoot himself in the chest? What if Dimitri drove the car back to the city, staged Strickland's suicide, and then staged his own disappearance?  How far could he run? How long could he hide? Who would help him?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello everyone from tumblr! I hope this satisfies your hungers and slakes your thirsts.  
> There will be Adult Content in other chapters, because I'm giving everyone who was left behind a happy ending.

When Dimitri woke up, the first conscious thought he had was--How the hell did that _work_?  
His next thought was less a coherent thought than a sudden sensation, the cold, shocked feeling after the scalpel’s slice.  
The right side of his face was one solid fibrous ache, from his cheekbone up to his ear; the inside of his mouth where, ludicrously, that bastard had actually managed to _shoot him_ , apparently crosswise. 

In a glance he took in the room he was in--pale-green walls, white curtains, cheap scratchy white coverlet an sheets that reeked, somehow, of both disinfectant _and_ mildew. He was not shackled to the bed, and his ‘room’ was screened off from the rest of the ward--with nothing more than an ugly beige curtain. 

Everything was faintly blurred, and he found his glasses on the bedside table, beside a white plastic cup and a clear plastic jug of water. The frames were slightly bent and one lens was cracked. There was also a narrow, ugly metal lamp, the sort of thing one would expect to see in cheaper motels.  
He was clearly not in an important government hospital, prison or otherwise; there was no security to speak of. 

He breathed a sigh of relief. He knew he didn’t have any paperwork on him that would have gotten him a spot in a good private hospital; that left only the county hospital or a religious hospital--small, overcrowded places where the turnover was too high for any one man to have been of notice, much less one man with no wallet, no identification, and no money. 

He was anonymous again, adrift. Free, for the time being, to set up a new identity, or recall a useful old one.  
He quelled that idea almost immediately. Any old cover he used would have been compromised; the moment his handlers failed to report back, they would go sniffing for him, or any previous version of him.

For a few moments he paused to evaluate the injuries and how badly they’d impede any escape, before realizing he was going nowhere fast. Gunshot wounds to the face, the abdomen, the shoulder; that explained the dull spreading ache an the reason why his arm felt like it had been wrapped in a lead sleeve. Whatever medication they had given him had not fully numbed the pain, but he had the luxury of being conscious of it in a secondary way, far enough from it to feel distaste of it rather than fear.  
After awhile he swallowed, with great difficulty, wincing down pain, and began to invent a new suit of lies. 

~

An interminable amount of time passed before anyone came in.  
First he’d heard a rattle and then a clank as the door opened; his stomach had lurched in his body and he’d felt the nervous sweat spring up on his forehead and in his armpits. Still, he steeled himself, straining everything in himself to listen for details.

He could her the soft scuffing sound of a pair of low heels over the scuffed linoleum floor--a steady gait, quiet but sure. Not someone searching for a room or even a bed; this was someone who already knew where everything was. He heard the curtain rings of a curtain farther down the row being pulled, the low murmur of voices. A woman speaking to a man whose response was almost completely garbled--either a broken jaw or head trauma.  
Dimitri hoped the other poor bastard just had the jaw issue. 

A short while later the nurse finally arrived at his own little cubicle, announcing herself by clearing her throat before pulling the curtain aside.  
She was middle-aged in a way that suggested she had never been young--dyed red hair and bright red lipstick over a foundation of powder too pale for her complexion, which showed through at the neck of her buttoned-up uniform.

“You’re awake?” she said. She sounded almost skeptical. Then, taking the clipboard with his chart from the foot his bed, she glanced at it. “Mr…”

“De Campos,” he managed, somehow. The inside of his mouth tasted like a scab, and talking made the stitches in his cheek and gums drag against his tongue in a vaguely horrifying way. Whatever they had used to numb the site was topical, and was wearing off fast. “Actually, Doctor Julio de Campos,” he managed. He didn’t have to fake the accent; his voice was thick from pain, the painkillers, and the stitches.  
“Doctor,” the nurse said, flatly. “Well, do you know where you are?”  
He manage to jerkily shake his head. She continued with her unimpressed stare.

“County General,” she said. “You’re lucky to be alive, the way you came in. They say you were shot three times and someone stole your wallet and your coat.”  
“My ring,” he lied, meekly. “Was--was there a ring?”  
“If there was, they took it,” she said, glancing again at the chart. “Says here you were found face-down in an alley on…”

The particulars washed over him. He accorded each detail to memory with the strained determination of one in pain, who is unsure when or if it will cease, with the knowledge that the information they are learning is in danger of slipping away under the current of agony.

When she finished confirming the information as he had wanted it presented, he whimpered again for the fictitious ring, thinking that perhaps doing so would elicit an emotional response in her--either sympathy or disgust.

Either would have been useful. The sympathy may have earned him a few snacks, someone who would come in and chat with him an gently fuss over him and give him an ear into the outside world.  
The disgust would have driven her away, and given him time to think over his situation and what he would do to escape it--to lay his next tracks, his next plans.

As if it mattered; how far could he run now, with the mess Strickland had made? Where could he go? His apartment--a safe-house as ‘safe’ as a birdcage is against a feral alley-cat--had been compromised to both groups, likely from the beginning.

He wondered how long it would be before his handlers were missed--if the setup with they and Strickland would stick, if those who came searching for them would keep an eye on the Americans, or if they would try to search him out.

He hoped that his setup with Strickland’s car would work, to at least throw suspicion on the Americans. But he realized, in the back of his mind, that there was not much he could do.  
He came back to the present to see the nurse watching him with a blank, impassive face.  
In the end, she went with disgust, sighing hard through her pinched-looking nose.

“Look here, Mr. de…” she trailed off halfway through, and even through the haze of pain he felt a stab of hatred towards her; she wasn’t even going to _try_ to get the name right. She probably thought it was beneath her to pronounce it properly--to say nothing of the title she’d left off.  
“We run a hospital, not a lost-and-found. Really, it’s a good thing we got to you when we did--a lost ring is the least of your worries, right now.”

She didn’t have to tell _him_ that. He already knew--a gut shot, a shoulder wound that would, if he was lucky, leave him with perhaps 75% mobility of that arm--an the miracle miss, the face shot that had gone into his open mouth and left the side of his cheek a ragged hole, instead of through his brain stem and killing him instantly. They had removed three of his teeth from his upper jaw, probably those that had been shattered by the bullet. His gums had been stitched closed over the open sockets.

“Anyway, I’ll make a note that you woke up and you’re talking. I suppose you’ll want more medicine,” she said, but the sardonic note in her voice told him that, if she could have avoided the work, she would have.

“Please,” he said. He gave her as desperate and as piteous a look he could manage, knowing already that she was not the sort of woman on whom that would work.

Good, he told himself, if she has a heart of stone, then at least I can build on that. There will be other nurses, kinder ones, who he could squeeze some sympathy out of. American hospitals being damnable pay-as-you-go hellscapes, he probably wouldn’t meet too many before the finally tossed him out on the street, recovery or no. He knew what county hospital meant. County hospitals were where unwanted, unknown, or undesirable poor people went to either die or, against the odds, get better.  
He was hoping that his case would be the latter.


	2. Oh My God, They Were Roommates

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Giles didn’t know what to say.  
> He didn’t know where to look.  
> He certainly didn’t know what to make of the small, stocky man who stood in the hallway, looking almost apologetic.

Giles didn’t know what to say.  
He didn’t know where to look.  
He certainly didn’t know what to make of the small, stocky man who stood in the hallway, looking almost apologetic. He was wearing an ill-fitting coat that came nearly to his ankles, and his glasses were cracked. The left half of his jaw was plastered up with a large white bandage, and he had an unkempt beard around that; the oversized coat’s collar was turned up. 

“I…I must apologize for intruding…old friend,” he said. But even through the flawless Mexican-Spanish accent, even past the beard and the bandages and the longer hair, and the ill-fitting clothing, Giles could see him.

The man who had saved his life--who had saved Elisa’s, and her fish-beau’s, and Zelda’s.  
“You…you…” he opened and closed his mouth silently for a long moment, like a fish. His hand was numb on the doorknob, his fingers nerveless.  
“You…must come in,” he said at last, his face twitching into a very, very nervous smile. He hoped he at least managed to look as glad as he felt. 

Once the younger man was in his apartment, he felt thoroughly ridiculous. The place was, of course, a mess--it had been almost three weeks since Elisa’s disappearance with her amphibious lover, almost three weeks since--well, a lot of things. It was hard for him to think. 

No one had rented or even looked at Elisa’s room. It had been a mercy; sometimes he would go over there and just sit on her couch, rest his hands on its faded olive-green cushions, where his best--his only--friend had laid her head every night.  
Their lives were such small things, after all, so fragile and so full of delicate detritus. 

He didn’t say any of this maudlin nonsense to the man who gingerly stepped across his threshold an seemed about to nervously pull his oversized coat closer to himself, or who seemed half-likely to fall over.  
“Oh--would you--I mean, please, have a seat--” the table was totally strewn with papers and random art supplies, and one of the chairs had two curious cats sitting in it and watching them very intently. The other had a pile of laundry draped over its back.

“The--the couch,” Giles said at last, with a pang on inward despair. And then, when the other man took a faltering step forward, he caught him by the elbow and half-supported him as he made his slow way into the tiny area he’d decorated like a sitting room.

The shorter man sat on the couch. Giles sat at his easel. More moments passed in silence, until it was nearly painful, before finally the scientist looked askance and said, “Thank you for…letting me inside. I was afraid for a moment…” he trailed off. The accent was dropped, as effortlessly as a party hat, and there he was, speaking his quiet, upright flat English.  
Giles, having politely held it in as long as he could, blurted, “What _happened_ to you?”

The other man looked at him with tired, sad eyes. For a moment he looked simply piteous, then something steely flickered under his expression; it was the most minute shift, there and then gone.  
It made Giles’ insides feel tight to wonder what that expression meant.  
The scientist said, “It’s…sort of a long story. And very complicated.”

Giles spread his hands and gave him what he hoped was an obliging smile. “Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve got all day and I’m not in any hurry.”  
The scientist gave him a small, twitchy smile, and then sighed. He straightened from the couch cushions, even though doing so obviously pained him.

“Everything I am about to tell you, I am telling you in confidence, and because _she_ trusted you,” he said--she, of course, meaning Elisa, because everything came back to her, like the moon pulling the tides-- “And I could tell almost right away that she was a brilliant woman.”  
“She _is_ terrific, isn’t she?” Giles said, softly. 

The doctor seemed about to say something, opening his mouth a moment; but then he withdrew whatever thought he’d had, shutting his mouth and frowning for a moment.

Giles thought it was a very cute look. He realized next that he probably _shouldn't_ think it was a cute look; he had met this man _once_ before, immediately after seeing him stab an MP with a mean-looking syringe full of something deadly. He filed it away for later, in ‘Faces He Wished He Could Draw’.  
The thought was almost immediately lost to the flood of what the other man told him.

He began with, “I don’t think we’ve…actually been introduced. My name is…well, my name is actually Dimitri.” He extended his hand.  
“Giles Dupont. Er. In case Elisa never told you…?” he said.  
When Giles reached out to shake his hand, a few things struck him almost immediately.  
The first was that his hands were very soft, and very warm, and callused in unusual places--and the second was that he was carrying himself very oddly, not just because of the boxy, poorly-fitted coat.  
He seemed about to drop with exhaustion, n Giles felt panic rising with sadness for him.  
“Let me--you look like that coat is swallowing you whole. Let me help you out of it?”

Finally rid of the garment, he no longer seemed like a cat badly swaddled in a burlap sack.  
An injured cat, Giles remanded himself, knowing how some people could hide injuries up until what seemed like a horrifyingly sudden end.

Dimitri started talking. Giles had the distinct feeling that he was getting a severely edited version of the story, but he didn’t blame the guy--he wasn't _good_ at this kind of thing, and as far as he was concerned, the fewer secrets he knew, the better. He wasn’t good under pressure and he wasn’t good at lying.  
He was relieved the other man was alive, after all he told him.

Then, immediately following the relief, there was a knife of fear--had he been followed? That was what happened, in all those spy movies, in all the books--someone followed someone else, someone slid a packet under a door, there was a suspicious hissing sound, the room filled with undetectable poison gas, and both the inhabitants were dead moments later. Right?  
He wiped his hands uselessly on his trousers.

Neither of them spoke for a long, long beat of silence, after Dimitri finished talking--then Giles’ manners caught up with him at last, winning out over his nerves.

“Would you like--” Giles began.  
“I’m so terribly sorry to have imposed on you like this,” Dimitri said, at the same time.

“That’s--that’s all right,” Giles said. So many emotions were fighting to go in all directions inside him that he didn't even know what to do or say. He blurted, “Sorry I didn’t say anything at first. I’m--I’m not good at this. I mean, with people in general, I suppose. Then, when you explained what happened, I thought--maybe you were followed, maybe there was some sort of--of code, or something, that I was supposed to--”

And then, ludicrously, the scientist _laughed_. It was a sudden sound, bitter, and he winced and shook his head. “No, no, I have no more of those left. Please.”  
Dimitri glanced down at himself and made a soft, resigned noise. “A lot has happened, hasn’t it?” he murmured.  
Giles nodded.  
“Ms. Esposito? The amphibious man? What happened to them?” Dimitri asked.

And Giles, who had been aching to speak to _someone_ else--because Zelda would get a faraway, sad-eyed look whenever he’d mention the events, and he didn’t want to keep making her sadder like that--so Giles had been as heavingly full of the secret, like a cask with good wine slowly turning to vinegar. He told him everything. 

It was night when he finished talking. They sat for some interminable amount of time in the yellowish, flickering twilight gloom left by the theater’s marquee lights.  
He was silent for a long moment, before he sighed. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, that’s good. Now he’s out of their grasp and most likely will be, forever.”  
“I can’t imagine he’d want to spend any time near humans after _thatHE _was ridiculous.  
“Thank you,” the other man said, slowly. “For being so considerate.” __

__“Of course! You…you saved the, er. Fish man. You saved Elisa--hell, you saved _ME_ , too! Goodness knows I almost made a horrible hash of that whole, er…” he trailed off, almost as if he remembered or reminded himself that he shouldn’t be speaking of such things. _ _

__He had the creeping sensation that maybe someone--or several dangerous, armed someones--were waiting just outside the door, with a stethoscope pressed to the wood, like in a cheesy spy flick. How much truth was there to those movies, even?  
But then, he asked himself, why would he show up like this? Out of the blue and looking like he’d just been through hell?_ _

__“I really don’t mean to impose,” Dimitri said, softly, “But my own place is on the other side of town. The last bus…”  
Giles chuckled a little, thinking to himself that it had been years since he’d been young enough, or handsome enough, for a man to use _that_ excuse to stay the night.  
Then of course he sobered up. This man in question was a real live spy--a real live _Russian_ spy, whose real name he wasn’t even sure of. He wasn’t even properly sure that _Elisa_ had ever known the man’s real name.  
But then he had the more-than-sobering thought that he had stabbed that MP to secure their escape. He didn’t even know how much else he’d done, both to help the fish man and Elisa.  
“Please,” Giles said, “Stay as long as you like.”  
And he meant it. He just really hoped the invitation wouldn’t earn him a knife in the back sometime in the night. 


	3. Occasional Insomnia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dimitri has insomnia. Giles gets work. There is an unsatisfying breakfast. Like minds meet!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! Thank you for reading along, and thank everyone who has commented! I hope you like this chapter, too. :)

Dimitri lay awake on the man’s bed, under a borrowed wool tartan blanket that smelled warmly of cat fur an bay rum aftershave and India ink. Giles had refused to let him sleep on the couch, after hearing how he’d been injured, and despite Dimitri’s protests that he was not so fragile anymore. (This was only partly true. He was still wired taut from the nerves of the entire thing--a very public bus ride, the painful, slow limp to the theater. Without the adrenaline from the constant fear of being caught, he knew he would have fallen over with exhaustion.)

He should leave, he knew. Giles had told him everything he could--there was nothing else to do.  
He should leave, should slip away to Mexico, where he could quietly sink into obscurity as a doctor in some town too small and remote for anyone to care--or else in a city large enough to afford anonymity in sheer numbers. He probably would have been better off leaving as soon as he could; there were still loyal Communists there, decent people who believed in the cause, untouched by the scramble and all the grasping cruelty going on in Moscow.  
At this point trying to get to Canada would be dangerous as well as pointless; there might still be active agents there, and running across someone after everything that had happened would be lethal.

But he was also sure, then, that he had not been followed, that his trail was gone. Enough time had passed that the eyes would move elsewhere. He’d already declared the amphibious man dead, and he was well aware that there was no way anyone was going to be able to wade through the mountains of paperwork generated by his abduction and subsequent disappearance, whether to verify or deny his report. There would be nothing to contradict his report; there would be nothing at all. The intelligence officials would have convinced themselves that Strickland an the Americans had caught him--poor “Bob Hoffstetler”--and done away with him; that they had found him out, and then sent Strickland and some agents to dispose of his handlers, to tie up loose ends. 

And, well, if Strickland had killed himself out of desperation, at the end of it--it _had_ been an incredibly high-security operation he’d been heading. His own superiors certainly would not have been happy with the loss of such an important specimen. Dimitri knew this much: that was the one way I which both the people at OCCAM and the people he’d worked for were the same. If you failed, you disappeared. Suicide would have been the most painless and actually less humiliating way to die, in that context.

Giles’s story of a touching goodbye, midnight at the canal, and Elisa’s final embraces for him and Zelda before she leapt into the canal with her amphibious lover was a pleasant fairy-tale. He touche the details with his mind, over and over, until the exhaustion finally pulled him under. His dreams weren’t dreams at all: he drifted in and out of sleep, the memories poking through now and again.

“Promise me,” Dimitri said to Giles, as he sat on the edge of the bed. “They escaped? And no one has the amphibious man?”  
Giles had stood there looking at him, sad and certain. “I’m certain I saw her one last time. I’m certain she hugged me as hard as she could, then Zelda, and then--” he made a little gesture in the air. “There was a little splash and they were gone. They could be--they could be anywhere.”  
“ _He_ was amphibious. How well do you think _she_ could swim?” Dimitri countered.  
Giles ran a hand through his newly regrown hair. “If he could give be back this, I’m sure he could give her whatever she wanted.”

He’d leaned forward to reach for the lamp, and Dimitri had the strange sensation of being home again. Other memories from other times, someone warm and solid leaning over him in a cramped dormitory to turn off a lamp--and the warm feeling persisted in his chest long after the older man patted him on the shoulder to say goodnight, and lingered even after he’d left the ‘room’. 

~

Some time around four in the morning, Dimitri woke from a light, uneven sleep. The pain was back now, but with its fuzzy edges rubbed off: the hot spreading pain in his stomach and the bone-raw feeling in his mouth throbbed in time with his heartbeat, and somehow his shoulder was the _least_ painful injury at the moment.  
He sat up with a hiss of pain and swung his legs free of the blanket, freezing for a second when a fuzzy blur disentangle itself from the rest of the darkness and raced off. 

A few moments later he caught the iridescent gleam of a pair of cat’s eyes from across the room.  
He smiled a little, remembering Giles’ cats. Carefully, he levered himself upright by holding onto the bed’s frame, and then made his way slowly and cautiously out of the small partitioned bedroom.  
It was very dim, but never properly dark; the huge half-circle window, combined with the movie marquee n the streetlights outside, meant that the light pollution outside could not help but bleed into the small apartment. 

He found his way into the kitchenette easily enough, rustled silently through cupboards an cabinets until he found the glasses, and quietly poured himself some water.

The hospital pharmacy had given him some medication and a prescription for more, which he would of course forge to up the dose so that he could have some for longer. He swallowed painkillers and drank the glass of water, looking t the back of the couch, the small television, the sacks of books and paintings leaned everywhere. At the back of the couch where the painter was sleeping, snoring very quietly. 

After finishing the water, he walked with slow, uneven steps down the apartment’s tiny hall, until his fingers brushed a doorknob, which he turned: an oddly spacious bathroom yawned into view.  
He shuffled inside and quietly shut the door before flicking the light on.

Giles’ entire home was small and cluttered an completely homey, in a way his own apartment had never been. (The reason for that, of course, being that it was not actually his apartment. Technically it was Dr. Robert Hoffstetler’s apartment, containing only the sorts of things he would need. Dr. Robert Hoffstetler had been a rather boring man.) 

There was a claw-foot tub with fixtures that had bled rust into the porcelain, and a metal rack with two robes hanging off it--one, a brown quilted house robe, and the other a fluffy white terrycloth one. The bathroom cabinets were full of boxes of soap, and a stack of worn, frayed towels, behind which he found three jars of Dr. Braun’s Hair Regrowth Pomade, pushed to the back and almost hidden. He smiled a little, though the pull hurt his face. 

In the medicine cabinet he found toothpaste, a razor and spare blades, a bottle of Listerine. There was nothing especially remarkable, and certainly no hidden microphones or cameras. A short sweep of the walls confirmed there was nothing suspicious at all--nothing so much as a mouse-hole in any corner.

He felt a bit bad for going through the other man’s things, especially when he was most likely neither a threat or being watched. But he hadn’t managed to stay alive this long by being incautious or anything less than meticulous.

This all being done, he close the mirror, stared into the sink, and blinked once, hard.  
When he opened his eyes, man whose face swam into view in the mirror was almost stranger--unkempt hair, uneven beard with a patch shaved off messily to accommodate the bandage plastering his right cheek. The circles under his eyes were heavy and almost purplish enough that he looked like he’d been punched in the eyes. 

He gripped the edges of the sink with both hands--one shoulder stinging with the effort and his fingers spasming slightly on the sink. He sighed. 

Finally he reached up and cautiously peeled back part of the dressing on his face. The wound was mostly healed, the stitches loose and redundant in the healing skin. The scar itself was an ugly grape-sized knot in his cheek, with a smooth, bumpy ridge on the inside where the stitches had pulled his cheek away from his teeth. If he probed it with his tongue, it w still tender enough to sting.  
He replaced that bandage, shuffled back to the door to double check that it was locked, an then began carefully unbuttoning his shirt. 

It was not the one he had been admitted with, obviously. They had charitably brought him a donated shirt that was a size too large and smelled vaguely of grease and mildew, and an undershirt that was a bluish-gray from having been washed with too many odd-colored garments. These he peeled off carefully, one-armed, before assessing his shoulder and stomach. Once he was satisfied with the way the wounds were healing, he changed the dressing, tossed the old bandages in the trash, put his shirt back on, and slipped back out of the bathroom again. The door lapped shut behind him quietly.

He sat back down at the kitchen table and watched the day break, and listened to the city come alive, and tried not to let his thoughts run away with him. 

Dimitri had a sudden flash of longing for his own small footlocker of cookbooks and poetry collections, which he knew now without a doubt he would never see again.  
Such are the sacrifices people make for the greater good, he told himself. He didn’t think the thought with any bitterness. 

He was one of the only scientists in the world who knew that there was another sentient species on Earth, and he had done everything he could to make sure one of the members of that species was safe, and free.

~

Mornings were slow affairs, apparently. Giles didn’t stir at all until almost ten, by which point Dimitri was quietly being gnawn alive by hunger.  
His earlier poking around had showed him that the refrigerator was empty except for a quart of milk and half a carton of eggs. The cabinets weren’t much better.

He’d already decided on three or four separate things he could make by the time Giles finally woke with a snort, an then st up with a little groan. He seemed almost surprised to find Dimitri sitting at the table; Dimitri held up the glass of water and gave him a small smile by way of explanation.  
“Good morning,” Giles said. The words lapsed into a monumental yawn about partway through, as the older man slowly got to his feet. 

“Good morning,” Dimitri said. “I didn’t want ti wake you, so I helped myself around.”  
Giles straightened, his back giving a series of little pops, as he rubbed his shoulders and carefully shuffled around the side of the couch.

“It’s no problem,” Giles said. “Not much space to give a tour of, anyway, I suppose. What, er. What would you like for breakfast?” 

Dimitri smiled innocently and shrugged one shoulder as Giles went to the fridge and opened it, glancing at him a bit guiltily before letting the door swing the rest of the way open.  
“Anything is fine,” Dimitri said.  
“Oatmeal and scrambled eggs?” Giles offered. “Is coffee okay?”

They sat at the table and Dimitri politely drank cheap coffee and ate dry, crispy scrambled eggs and oatmeal that was somehow both watery and under-cooked. Dimitri wondered how long Elisa ha been feeding Giles for, or if the poor man survived off of deli sandwiches and diner food, the way so many bachelors did. 

Instead of mentioning this, he nodded over Giles’ shoulder, at a half-finished painting of a girl with black bangs leaning playfully around an unpainted corner.  
“Audrey Hepburn?” he asked. “The likeness is very...”

Giles turned in his seat to follow his gaze, and then turned back around looking embarrassed.  
“It…wasn't supposed to be, originally. That ended up being why I couldn’t sell it, though.” he said. Dimitri smiled a little, still enthralled. It had honestly been more than a decade since he’d been around the kind of curative people who could really call themselves artists.

He wished he’d been able to save his sketchbook, with all his anatomical drawing of the amphibious man; he ha a feeling Giles would have enjoyed the work. He wondered briefly what they would do with it, whose hands it would end up in. Most likely locked in a file cabinet full of documents so highly-classified that perhaps only ten or fifteen people in the entire country would ever be granted clearance to look at them--or else released in twenty or thirty years, butchered by censors.  
He pulled himself away from the thoughts before he could go too far. There was no use looking backwards like that, not for him.

Giles continued, “Ahh…I’ve got plenty of unfinished pieces lying around. A lot of the stuff started out as commissions that were canceled because the agency or customer decided to go with photos instead of paintings.” He shrugged. “The times, I suppose.”

Dimitri was still curious,though. “Actually, I feel a lot of modern photography leaves much to be desired. Everyone is rushing to make everything look sleek and futuristic and often they just make it look mechanical and sterile.” 

Giles stared at him, his eyes growing wider n wider, until for one moment he grinned from ear to ear.  
“Well--that’s--that’s how I feel, exactly! It’s too slick, too--wait a moment, let me show you something,” he got up and hurried over to a stack of papers crammed into a manila folder, itself crammed between two large books.  
He came back to the table and slapped the fat folder own between their bowls of oatmeal.

“Look. I’ve--I’ve compiled some photos for research. Trying to get the edge on the enemy, as they say,” he said. He stood back with his hands on his hips.  
Dimitri flipped the folder open an thumbed through it one-handed. He’d only gone three pages when he made a little frown of distaste. The first few pictures, it seemed, were all for foods--all photos in garish colors, badly-lit.  
“Well…if the goal that these photographers had in mind was making their clients’ food look like poorly-made wax copies of real food, then I suppose…”

“Hah! You think so, too? And I know, aren't they just _terrible_? Here, look at this one for snack cakes…”  
Dimitri blinked, then frowned. “This can’t be serious.”  
“Oh, but they are, an that’s the terrible thing.”  
“They’re bright blue!” Dimitri protested. Then, incredulous an pleasantly scandalized, he said, “Did this go to print? Like this?”

“It did! Look, let me show you the one they turned down, in favor of this garbage.” He bustled away an came back with a modest, matted gouache painting of an inoffensive little yellow lemon cake, set at a charming angle on a white plate. The plate’s gold rim had been given a very delicate treatment.  
“This is nice,” Dimitri said. “What was wrong with it?”  
“’Too prim’. Have you ever _heard_ anything so ridiculous?”

Dimitri had, actually, but he snorted a little incredulous laugh and shook his head.  
“This is very nice, though. The loose green brush strokes in the background really help set the cake off.”

When he looked back up, Giles was smiling at him very eagerly, but also with a kind of almost desperate happiness in his eyes. His entire body said Thank you! At last, someone else who understands!  
“You talk like you know something about art, Doctor.”

Dimitri smiled a little. “Just…Dimitri is fine. And I do. I studied anatomy and hominid evolutionary biology extensively, but even prior to that, drawing was always a favorite hobby of mine.” 

Giles settled back down in his chair, still smiling, but now in a more contained way. Now instead of looking at Dimitri like he was a newly-discovered star, he was looking at him like he was an old friend who he very much wanted to catch up with.  
Dimitri like that attention more than he probably should.  
“I’d love to see your work,” Giles said. 

Dimitri felt so flustered for a moment that he ducked his head a little and shrugged.  
Before he could say anything about wanting to show him, or drawing something for him when his arm was healed, the phone rang.

Giles excused himself, and then had a very animated back-and-forth on the phone. Could he paint store display backdrops? Yes, of course! What were his rates? They were highly negotiable, of course! When could he start? Tomorrow morning, of course!

Giles was nearly beside himself with happiness when he got off the phone. He scooped up the nearest cat and waltzed around the kitchen with them in his arms, laughing.  
Dimitri could not explain why he found it so endearing that the cat was apparently fine with this treatment, or t the very lest so accustomed to it that they were calm. Finally Giles attempted to set the cat back down--the cat meowed in protest and clearly still wanted to be carried, however--so with them still in his arms he turned back to Dimitri.

“Finally, a stroke of luck! I’ve been waiting what feels like _ages_ for a call back from them. It’s about some store display backdrops they want me to paint, this little boutique, very classy…” and s Giles explained, Dimitri sat and listened, feeling strangely content.

There was one nagging detail, however.  
“Giles, I have a confession to make.” he said, speaking slowly and evenly.  
Giles looked at him curiously for a moment.

“About the place I referred to as staying t, on the other side of town,” Dimitri said, still hedging. This was actually more uncomfortable than removing your own stitches--something he was intimately familiar with.  
But then Giles surprised him by breaking into another smile, this one small but understanding. “Oh. I had wondered…but, well, it’s just me and my little fluffballs here. And…you were a great help to Elisa. I really _did_ mean it, when I offered to let you stay as long s you like. At least, until you get on your feet.”

Dimitri smiled, but it was a tired one. “I shouldn’t,” he said. “I’ll probably have to leave soon, and I can’t promise I’ll be able to contact you to thank you afterwards.”  
Giles’s smile turned rueful. “Yes, well, wherever Elisa went, I’m sure they don’t have long-distance phone calls. But I’m just as sure she’s happy and safe, and I know she’d thank me if she could.”

It was Dimitri’s turn to feel a little embarrassed and sad.  
He remembered something.  
“What did you tell the landlord?”

Giles made an unreadable noise. “What else was I supposed to say? I said she met a fellow and they eloped! Mr. Arzoumanian--the landlord--he seemed _happy_ for her. Said to give the lovebirds his regards when I got ahold of them again, said he was glad she finally found a husband, blah blah blah.”  
“Eloped!” Dimitri said, laughing a little.  
“What! It wasn’t inaccurate, as far s I could tell. They ran away together. Er, swam away.” Giles waved a hand and trailed off into grumbling so theatrical that Dimitri laughed again. 

They spent the rest of the day with Dimitri ensconced on the couch, one blanket over his knees an another over his shoulders and a cat bracketing him on either side, while Giles ran through his collection of his work. Dimitri sat and petted cats an occasionally made polite comments on Giles’ work, feeling gratefulness mingled with a bittersweet knowledge that it could not last.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, maybe you're wondering, Why Mexico? The reason I picked Mexico--besides it sharing a border with the US--is that there actually used to be a significant Communist party there. Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and many other prominent Mexican intellectuals and artists from the 1940 and 1950s were prominent members of the party, and it was to Mexico that the Marxist-Leninist theorist Leon Trotsky fled when Stalin started consolidating his power (and killing his perceived rivals, and anyone else who he didn't like).  
> So it made sense to me that Dimitri would choose that as a cover identity, knowing also that in the US. in the 1960s, society was very deeply racist, so a Mexican man would have essentially been invisible.


	4. Dinner and a Movie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Giles cooks! Don't worry, it goes better this time. Feelings are felt. People try to deny them. Spoiler: no one watches the movie.

The first time Dimitri almost fell, it was the next day, right after Giles got back from his first day working on the displays. 

Giles announced he was coming in by whistling part of a song--something they’d decided on, since Dimitri was still a wanted man, and surprises were never welcome. He was grinning ear to ear and practically glowing, carrying double-armloads of groceries, and he had to nudge the door closed behind himself with his elbow.

Dimitri started to rise to greet him, but his face crumpled before he was even properly out of the chair. His knees buckled and one hand went to his stomach. Giles didn’t remember dropping the groceries, but he suddenly found his arms under the other man’s, supporting his weight and settling him back into the chair.

“I’m so terribly sorry,” Dimitri mumbled.  
“Where does it hurt? Are you--Did you--did you take your medicine?” Giles asked.  
Dimitri nodded.  
“They let you leave the hospital like this?” Giles said, incredulous.  
Dimitri was still half-slumped over, his head bowed.  
“They were supposed to fit me a for a crutch,” he confessed.  
“And you left without it?”  
“The wait time was too long.”

“Yes, but--” Giles said. Then, “It can’t be…good for you, walking around injured like this.”  
“The injuries are more healed than they seem. I just…haven’t regained any strength…” Dimitri mumbled. One of his hands came up Giles’ arm and settled on his should, warm and almost damp through the material of his shirt.  
“Should I take a look at it?” Giles said. “To--I don’t know. Do you need to check to see if you reopened anything, or--”  
Dimitri grimaced. “I don’t think I did…”  
“Should…should I still check?”

Dimitri clenched his teeth--Giles could actually _hear_ it as he did--and felt along his stomach with one hand, gasping in pain when his fingers brushed the area in question.  
“...It couldn’t hurt,” he said, finally.  
Giles helped him limp back into the bedroom and slump onto the bed; he piled the pillows up but Dimitri shook his head. “It’s best if I just lie flat.”

Then, because he only had one good hand at the moment--and at the moment, that one good hand was shaking and sweaty--Giles had to unbutton his shirt.  
Dimitri looked away, chagrined, and Giles felt a flush of secondhand embarrassment mingled with sympathy.  
“Sorry about this,” he said. 

He got Dimitri’s shirt unbuttoned and helped him untuck his undershirt, which the other man carefully tucked up; he pressed one hand over the large white bandage on his abdomen and groaned softly in pain as he lay own and stretched out gingerly.

Dimitri was very pale, with a thatch of soft, feathery hair stretching across his chest and a thinner trail going down his stomach; they had (totally unnecessarily) shaved just above and below his navel.  
“I should…let me wash my hands,” Giles said, and hurried into the bathroom, washing his hands in frigid water and wringing them together until his knuckles ached.

When he came back out, Dimitri was still lying in the exact same position, grimacing in pain.  
Giles took a few shaky breaths before gingerly peeling off the bandage, halfway wanting to squint and look away because while he wasn't exactly _squeamish_ , he didn’t exactly want to see into a hole in someone’s guts, either.

His fears turned out to be unfounded, though.  
“It…looks sound? Though, I mean, I don’t know, the one time I got stitches it was when I was seven, maybe eight, because I busted my chin on our front stoop trying to roller-skate on the sidewalk without sweeping first.”  
Dimitri chuckle a little, pained. “Is there any blood?”  
“No.”

“That’s good,” Dimitri said. He swallowed; his lips were sticking together in a way that made Giles feel even more panicked, without being able to pinpoint why.  
“Swelling or discoloration around the laceration or the sutures?” he asked. His voice was so flat, so calm. Giles wondered if he should be worried about _that_ , too.  
“No, neither. It’s…it’s a pretty big…”

“The surgeons were probably less than generous with that,” he said. “There was no exit wound an they may have had to probe to locate the bullet.”  
Giles gave him a desperate look. “Let me get you your pain medicine n some water. Or--well, hell, I don’t know, what does a man who’s been shot need?”  
Dimitri huffed another laugh. “You’d laugh.”  
“No, anything!”  
“I want a cigarette.”

Giles did wrinkle his nose a little, at that. But he said, “Well…let me put the groceries away, and I could run down to the corner store and buy a pack. But shouldn’t I put a fresh bandage on this, first?”  
“You…you don’t have to do that. If you could just bring them to me, I can take care of it. They’re in a white paper bag in the coat’s left front pocket.” Dimitri said. 

 

The bored girl behind the corner store counter rang his purchase up without actually looking at him; her eyes were glued to a magazine. Those mop-headed British boys were apparently still a very big thing, though frankly having herd their music himself, he found them underwhelming. 

He took his bag--containing the cigarettes and, to make himself feel less strange about the entire encounter, a cheap bottle of wine that he reasoned they could have for dinner--and hurried out of the place, trying to quiet his pounding pulse.  
He couldn’t place why he was so nervous. 

He started whistling as soon as he was in the hallway, trying to make it seem less suspicious, and feeling ridiculous. There was no one here, besides he and Dimitri; it wasn't as if there were any place to hide, in the narrow, little hallway between their two apartments. 

When he got back inside, he was relieved to see Dimitri siting up a bit, with a bit more color in his cheeks. One of the cats had hopped up onto the bed beside him to investigate, and he was stroking their head and neck gently.  
“I, ah. I didn’t know which brand…” Giles said, realizing belatedly.  
Dimitri smiled, shaking his head. “Anything is fine.”

Giles handed him the bag, started to show him the wine, felt ridiculous and took it into the kitchen instead. He returned to check on him a moment later.  
“Do you happen to have a lighter?” Dimitri asked.  
Embarrassment bloomed hot in Giles' belly. “Actually, no, I don’t, sorry.”  
Dimitri had already put a cigarette on his lip, and only huffed a single breath of laughter, shaking his head. “Never mind. This is fine for now.”  
Giles sighed, shaking his head. “You’re remarkably taciturn about all this.” he said at last.

“There isn’t much else I can do, when I’m living entirely on someone else’s kindness as it is. I don’t want to make myself into a nuisance.”  
“You--” Giles made a noise that even _he_ didn’t understand the meaning of-- "You aren’t a _nuisance_ , you’re a hero! It’s just--me.”  
Dimitri regarded him with raised eyebrows. 

“I don’t really know how to take care of sick things. Or sick people. Hence the cats and not dogs,” Giles said. “They…ah, they pretty much take care of themselves.”  
Dmitri shook his head against the pillows, smiling a little. “Your nursing skills leave a bit to be desired, but you have, by far, the best bedside manner I have ever encountered.”  
Giles laughed at that, too. Then, “How are you even talking right now? Why--how did you _walk_ here, like this?”

“I had no choice,” Dimitri said, after a long pause. “They were terribly unsubtle. The nurse kept coming in with paperwork from different halfway houses. I removed myself form the situation before any more ‘hints’ were necessary.”  
“Well, I’m not going to drop any hints, an I’m not going to toss you out on your ear, either. I may not know exactly what to do, but I’ll help however I can, as best I can. It’s the lest I can do for--for the type of man who would--do what you did, to save an innocent being and others.” Giles said. He didn’t know where any of this was coming from. He just hoped Dimitri didn’t think it was strange.  
As it was, Dimitri was looking at him with wide eyes. 

Giles felt himself rambling but couldn’t stop himself. “And--well, Elisa didn’t tell me a lot--I suppose she wanted to protect your privacy an all--but she said you were a good man, a good person, an after what they did to you, all for--for not wanting to murder someone just because they didn’t understand the poor guy--well, I--I just thought, the least you deserved was…a helping…hand…” Giles trailed off at last.

Dimitri’s eyes were still wide, but his mouth was doing something strange: the cigarette quivered on his lip.  
Giles was embarrassed beyond further rambling.  
“I’ll--let me go see where I left those kitchen matches,” he said, and then hurried away, feeling horribly awkward. 

~

Later, while Dimitri was lying half-propped in bed, smoking, Giles puttered around in the kitchen, trying to put together something that resembled an actual dinner.

He had cans of Campbell’s in the pantry, of course, but figured the man would want something more substantial than salty chicken broth. So he’d exhumed his dusty copy of the Joy of Cooking, and, armed with that and sincere good thought, he set about trying to make something that was both edible and palatable. 

He had a strange flash of realization of what this entire setup looked like--here he was in the kitchen, making dinner for a gentleman guest--but he quashed it almost instantly. The poor man needed a tremendous deal of help; what he did _not_ need was some idealistic old fool getting soppy over him and developing a crush that would go nowhere.

And he had to keep chasing away the mental image of Dimitri lying in his bed, with his wide eyes, and the thatch hair on his chest that looked as soft as eyelashes. And his eyes--wide, thoughtful, always seeming almost plaintive. What _color_ were his eyes? They looked steel-grey in some light, hazel-green in others, almost black in the dark. And now Giles was really in trouble, because his mind started to drift to the paints necessary to blend to make those colors, the way he would frame his irises. He could see his own hand holding the charcoal as it drew in each individual black lash. 

He considered it a miracle he managed not to scorch the modest chicken dinner he was trying to put together. 

 

“Something smells good,” Dimitri said. He was leaning heavily against one wall, but he was upright and apparently walking, so Giles smiled and shrugged.  
“You sure you’re all right, to be up and on your feet right now?”  
“Yes, actually. I feel a bit better.” he paused, then nodded once. “Thank you for…earlier.”  
“You’re welcome. I, ah, didn’t really _do_ very much…” he trailed off.

“You didn’t have to do all this,” Dimitri said, when he came all the way around the corner and saw the table set, the food already laid out. It was nothing fancy--just Chicken Paprika, which mercifully required few ingredients and was simple enough to cook. Giles had followed the recipe to the letter; he was hoping Mrs. Rombauer’s recipe would not fail him.

“Well, you can’t keep eating nothing but canned soup,” Giles said. “You said yourself, you don’t have any strength.”  
He pulled the man’s chair for him, which made Giles feel a jolt of nervousness afterwards, worrying that the other man might take it the wrong way. This turned out to be unfounded, as Dimitri only smiled a little and thanked him, his voice quiet. 

Giles called the cats, then carefully stepped around the darting, meowing furry bodies all trying to rub up against his legs at once as he fed them. He felt both parts tired and excited when he finally sat down at the table.  
Dimitri was toying idly with his fork, and the way he handled his silverware suggested that he was either ambidextrous or had always been left-handed. Giles wondered if that was a spy thing they’d taught him, wherever it was that people learned to do those sorts of things. 

Instead of bluntly asking, he joked, “Waiting for me to have a bite to make sure it’s edible?”  
Dimitri smiled a little and shook his head. “Force of habit. That, plus it's rude to begin eating before everyone--especially the gracious host--is at the table.”

Giles would have blushed red to his hairline, if he’d allowed himself to think too hard about the man’s words. But he reminded himself that reading too much into other men’s small gestures had gotten him in trouble before; he did not need to ruin things by seeing things that weren’t there, now.  
They ate in amiable quiet, which lasted until they tried drinking the wine.  
Giles coughed so hard that Dimitri jumped in his seat. 

“Oh,” he groaned, “Ohhh, that is… _that_. My god, it’s like vinegar mixed with grape juice.” He rinsed his mouth with his glass of water, resisted the urge to go to the sink and spit, and settled for hastily swigging half the glass of water instead.

Dimitri raised an eyebrow an took a cautious sip, before wrinkling his nose and putting the glass down.  
“Well,” Giles said, “Maybe I could, er. Can’t you cook with wine that you don’t want to drink?”  
Dimitri shook his head. “Anything not fit for the table isn’t fit for cooking, either.” then, “When I was in college, we’d buy terrible wine just to get drunk. I suppose that’s the only thing stuff like this is acceptable for.” He held up the bottle and squinted at its label.  
“Pity it isn’t whiskey. Then at least I could use the stuff as disinfectant the next time I cut myself,” Giles said.

Dimitri snickered. “You’re supposed to use disinfectant on wounds, not paint thinner. I’m pretty sure you could use this to strip walls as it is…If it were whiskey…”  
Giles threw up his hands in mock disgust. “Well, then, what is it _good_ for?”  
“Do you know any desperate college students?” Dimitri asked.  
He had crow’s-feet around his eyes when he smiled wide enough, which was terribly endearing. He kept one hand pressed to the injured side of his face as he did, which gave Giles a weirdly pleasant little thrill that the man was _injured_ and _charming_. He felt a little guilty for thinking that.

~

“You don’t have to keep feeling indebted to me for what I did, you know,” Dimitri said softly.  
They were sitting side-by-side on the couch and, ostensibly, watching the late shows.  
Neither of them mentioned the fact that the television was turned down to a murmur so low they could hear the cars passing on the road outside.  
The dishes were on the drying rack, the leftovers put away, and the horrendous wine poured down the sink.

They both had blankets thrown over their laps. Giles had a cat on his lap and another perched between his shoulder and the back of the couch; one of the creatures, the one who had come to sit with Dimitri earlier, was sitting near his feet, their ears cocked back towards them in the very distinctive cat’s way of telling you that you were loved, but they were giving you space. 

If he moved his hand under the blanket, he wondered if he’d find Dimitri’s, there, on the cushions, as well--if his gratefulness for the man’s saving his life was making him think so much of this. He wondered if he was being greedy. The other man really did need a lot of help, and here he was with his loneliness running away with him. He wasn't even certain that the other man wouldn’t find his attraction unwanted or even repulsive; n he didn’t know what he’d do if he accidentally ruined the fragile trust slowly growing between them.  
“I know,” Giles said.

When Dimitri looked at him, his eyes were water-gray in the dark, the television throwing blueish lights onto his glasses. the one cocked lens had a single gleaming pane of white, reflected back flatly.  
“Thank you,” he said, very quietly. “For…helping me. And…for what you said earlier.”  
“It’s all true,” Giles said.  
Dimitri smiled at him, then, the expression wavering in the television’s flickering light. “It’s still nice to hear it.”

~

Again Dimitri woke just after four in the morning. This time he grabbed the matches and cigarettes off the nightstand before hauling himself upright and tottering to the bathroom.  
After locking an double-checking the door, he sat on the closed toilet’s lid, smoked a cigarette, and silently wept.  
Because he was starting to _like_ him.  
Giles was too good. The other shoe would drop soon--he would learn the other man was a widower still carrying a torch for his deceased--but beloved--wife; or else he would mention some lady friend, and then Dimitri would be faced again with the same ice-water feeling of losing something he never had. 

He should go, he knew. He should get some paperwork in order, gather as much medication as he could, and then get on a bus headed south. 

But the man had made him dinner and tried to get a bottle of wine to go with it. He bought him cigarettes and then apologized because they weren’t the exact right ones. He was poor, spending money on Dimitri, so that he could be comfortable, without any certainty that Dimitri would repay him, or would ever even be able to! He didn’t hesitate when Dimitri needed help; he didn’t even make him change his own bandages. How cruel, he thought, to fall on this kind of mercy and tenderness now, when he was in such a state that he couldn’t tell if it was just sympathy and decency, or pity, or something deeper!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my goodness, i forgot to note in earlier chapters: so, i play a lot of games on my computer, so my WADS keys are kind of...shot. Also, I have no beta reader. So, if you've been reading and noticing a lot of words missing the letters a,d,w, and s, i apologize for any confusion. Thank you for reading!
> 
> Also, you are all fantastic, and the comments are my lifeblood and greatest support right now. I cannot thank you enough for the encouragement and kindness. :)


	5. Restless Afternoon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dimitri has a bad scare; it turns into a good laugh. Zelda explains what's going on at OCCAM, and what has happened since Dimitri's disappearance and the disappearance of the Amphibious Man. Zelda is also a viciously good card player. Giles has actual, fulfilling work! The friends sit down to eat dinner. Dimitri tries to warn Giles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you've enjoyed reading this so far! Thanks for reading and please stay posted for the next chapter! :)

A few days passed peacefully, the two of them adjusting to living with one another.  
Dimitri had finally grown accustomed to the constant dull roar of noise from the theater below, the silences between movies, the rattle of the theater doors as people came and went.  
The place was never truly busy, which he was thankful for; in the back of his mind the nagging fear of being caught still lurked, coiled like a viper.

Dimitri did his best not to make a pest of himself, and to stay out of Giles’ way, but he found the man to be genuinely engaging, and the other man rarely withdrew when they were talking. Quite the opposite, in fact, since he usually asked Dimitri for his input on whatever he was working on.  
When he had realized that Dimitri had been politely sitting on the couch an politely watching television and politely wasting away out of boredom while he was away at work all day, Giles apologized.

“You--I'm so sorry, how thoughtless of me! Please, feel free to read anything you like!” Giles had said.  
Dimitri found his embarrassed, solicitous generosity so charming it startled him.  
Giles didn’t mean _any_ book, he thought. There had to be something the man would deny him; he just didn’t want to push and figure out what it was. Then, of course, the illusion of boundless generosity would shatter, the friendship would be strained, and--but Dimitri quelled these thoughts. They would get him nowhere.

Aloud, he said, “Thank you very much.” Then, after hesitating a moment, “Do you have any books of poetry?”  
Giles blinked at him, his eyes widening in pleased surprise.  
“Have _I_ got poetry? Oh, my goodness, hold on,” he said.  
He went to the bookcase an ha to shuffle around several stacks before he could get behind them, to where there were several handsomely-bound volumes, all in gray an with gilt lettering on their spines.  
“Let’s see--Shakespeare, Barrett Browning, Byron, Keats…what’s your poison?”  
Dimitri smiled. “Just the Shakespeare, for now.”

“Ah, of course! You could sit with just the Sonnets and be busy all day…” Giles said. He paused and gave Dimitri a smile so gentle it edged towards affectionate, which Dimitri noted with mingled fear and delight. He said, “Who do you really like, though?”  
“Anna Akhmatova is my favorite poet. Then there is Fernando Pessoa and all his identities, and Langston Hughes…”  
“Langston Hughes! How does a doctor from--from overseas find out about a Negro poet from Harlem?”

“You would be surprised how popular American Negroes are in Europe. When I was in Berlin, you couldn’t go two blocks without stumbling into someone promoting a jazz club or dance hall--all eagerly bragging that they had the _latest_ from America, of course.” Dimitri’s smirk was a little sardonic.  
“Oh, goodness, not people wearing shoe polish on their faces and miming along to records by Negro musicians, I hope,” Giles said, distressed.  
“Oh, no. But the musicians would play a certain way, with a certain flair, if you follow.” 

“Oh, I absolutely do. I’m probably going to embarrass myself by telling you this, but I’m old enough to remember when people used to talk about jazz music--an the people who made it--like it was sleaze incarnate, and that it was going to turn the entire nation into a bunch of reefer-addicted sex freaks, doing the Charleston and the Boogie and other scandalous things, like fucking with the light on. And then, all of a sudden, it was the kind of squeaky-clean family friendly stuff you could play in concert, at the park, where any old body could hear it!”

Dimitri snorted, feeling the irony in his bones. “The over-class always cannibalizes minority classes, especially those possessing overt ethnic and racial differences. First the over-class punishes the underclass for these differences, treating them as faults that must be stamped out, while simultaneously--usually over time--they begin to appropriate many of those same things for their own. It usually starts as a desire to seem fashionable by being flippant towards their own prevalent norms, but it is self-defeating, as once they have appropriated something for long enough, the over-class will begin to claim it as its own, and distance the appropriated property from its original creators as much as possible.” He looked askance at Giles. “That’s why forty years ago, jazz was devil music, then the favorite of fashionable rich girls in short dresses, and the reason that now there are several dozen radio stations that play nothing _but_ jazz--and none of them are owned or even operated by Negroes.”

Giles had watched him, eyebrows raised, and he smiled broadly when Dimitri finished speaking.  
“Well, when you put it like _that_ , Mr. PhD,” Giles said, laughing.  
Dimitri laughed, too. “I do actually have one, but not in musicology and certainly not in history. Though for a moment that was almost a close thing.”

Giles stared at him a moment, seemingly agog, before that old-friends smile came onto his face again.  
He gave Dimitri another one of those smiles before he steppe out the door. Dimitri checked to see it was locked, out of habit, his hand lingering on the wood as he listened to Giles’ footsteps retreat down the hallway outside. 

~

The rain had been incessant, the weather turning steadily colder. Dimitri was both awaiting and dreading the eventual freeze, wondering what they would do when the temperatures dropped seriously and the little artist’s garret apartment turned into a little artist’s garret icebox. And yet the snows might make it look like home--and if, by then, he was well enough to walk around, maybe he might be able to go and walk in it. 

He lay on the couch thinking these thoughts, so remote and far-off that they might as well be dreams.  
One of the cats was lying on the couch with him, their legs neatly tucked beneath their body. He told the cat a little nonsense poem in Russian, something about a cat-loaf. The cat listened, as cats do, with eyes close in deepest contentment. When he finished, the creature licked their chest and began to purr, as if in approval. He laughe and stroked their silky little forehead, holding his hand still when they butted their face into his cupped palm.

He had yet to learn all of their names, and felt equally guilty and nervous about it. Some part of his training nagged at him for missing an important detail, as if he would ever have to recall the names, habits, and appearances of all Giles’s cats, while under severe pressure. But this was too nice to think of such things. The dreamlike stillness of the afternoon, the rain on the roof…somehow even the leaks seemed picturesque, and added to the homey atmosphere of the place. (Leaks which pinged down softly into two old, dented saucepans which Giles had in a cabinet, out of the way, for situations just such as these). Dimitri had felt a surge of strange mingled nostalgia and warmth when he had woken up one morning an seen the old man swearing softly as he set the pans down, gently touching the spot dampened by the leaks.

He thought of Kostya, back in their cramped little dorm room, stuffing newspaper into the crack under the door. He had a sudden, almost painfully vivid memory of leaping out of Kostya’s bed in terror when Kostya swore as the door swung open, undoing all his careful work. But it was only Misha, their third roommate and Kostya’s close friend since they were little kids. The paper ended up so crumpled that Kostya had to do it all over again, still swearing good-naturedly at Misha. 

He remembered how the radiator had never worked, and how he had almost immediately put a board on top of it and turned it into a drying board for his watercolor paintings. He thought of the three of them huddled around the one desk, their feet resting on a hot brick, and the soft, soft ticking of the snow on the roof outside, quieter than silence. The sound unbroken except by the turning of a page or someone’s pen on paper. 

But Misha’s father had been branded an enemy of the party, and his entire family exiled to Siberia, and Kostya…

There was a sound coming from the hallway.  
It was hard to tel, at first; the movie that ha been showing downstairs had just gone off, and in the following trough of silence, he heard it. Had he been so lost in his thoughts?  
A door opened and then closed.  
Dimitri shot upright on the couch, ignoring the pain in his abdomen and shoulder; the panic was like knives in his gut for a moment, overriding everything else.  
They were here. 

They were here, and they were next door, searching Elisa’s apartment, probably looking for evidence. If they knew anything, they would know to look for the boxes of dried algae flakes he’d given her, for shedded scales, for anything.  
Giles was at work. 

That meant Dimitri would have time--time to deal with whoever was next door, time enough, he hoped, to deal with the body. He wouldn’t have time to get anything together for his flight--everything would be terribly slapdash. He wondered if it would be more dangerous to leave Giles a warning note, or to wait until he got back to tell him in person. Had the other agent come alone? Or was there someone waiting downstairs at the front desk, some polite stranger in a long coat, making opaque small talk to waste time and distract the old man who owned the theater?  
He hoped that whoever it was hadn’t already reported Giles’s address to their higher-ups.  
He hoped he hadn’t put a target on Giles’s back. 

He limped silently into the kitchen, and felt through a drawer of disused kitchen gadgets, pulling out a cheese wire. This would have to be quick and quiet; he was in no shape for any kind of physical altercation, and he knew with a grim certainty that if they managed to kill him, there would be no one to warn Giles afterwards.

He paused for a moment at the door, giving one last, despairing look over the small, cluttered apartment that had come to be his shared home. The cats had moved and were sitting in a rectangle of light just in front of the couch, and turned their heads to stare at him, curious: a feeling like a sob rose inside him, before he crushed it down.  
He stashed the cheese wire up the shirtsleeve of his good arm, took a deep breath, and then slipped out the front door.

Whoever it was, they were careless; the door to Elisa’s apartment was unlocked, and he was able to steal in silently, shutting it behind himself just as quietly.  
Downstairs, another movie started, cymbals crashing. Trumpets blared loudly for a moment.

Someone was over by one of the walls, reaching to put something in a cubby. They were short and stocky, and when he was close enough he could see their hair was up--a woman’s bouffant. He was surprised a moment, before remembering the number of women spies he’d known to be just as viciously efficient as the men, if not more. He hoped he didn’t know her, whoever she was, even as he realized with a surge of absurd shame that it wouldn’t matter even if he did. She had been sent to kill him. She might have been sent to kill _Giles_ , too, if they knew about him.  
It was enough to make his stomach clench painfully.

The cheese wire slipped into his hand effortlessly as a thought, and he had enough time to reach for the dowel at the other end when the figure turned around.  
Zelda Fuller, to her credit, swung first--what would have been a blinding strike to the face, with a woman’s high-heeled pump gripped tight in one fist. 

Dimitri dodged backwards with a gasp, and she froze mid-swipe when she saw his face.  
They regarded each other in shock for a long moment, the cheese wire hanging from his hands almost ludicrous now, as ridiculous as the shoe she still had in one hand.  
Then she stamped one foot and whispered sharply, “What the _hell_ are you doing, sneaking up on people like that?”

“I…thought you were…somebody else,” he said.  
“Someone from _work_ , you mean?” she asked.  
He hesitated. Then, “Yes.”  
“You don’t have to worry about that any more. Everybody thinks the Russians got the fish-man, and they think that man snapped and killed you, afterwards.”  
Dimitri frowned. “He…he what?”

“Oh, lord,” Zelda said. She hurried to the door, locked it, and then pulled him away from the doorway and into the little kitchenette. It seemed everyone was either prudent or nervous, and he admired her the more for her forethought.  
The kitchenette’s layout was identical to Giles’s, but devoid of his artist’s clutter and littered with a dreamy woman’s, instead--pretty decorative tins freckled with rust, old perfume bottles, tiny pots of shoe polish in many different colors.  
“You look like you could use a seat,” she said, nodding at the kitchen table and chairs. 

He held onto the back of a chair with a knuckle-creaking grip, but was too wound-up to take a seat.  
“No, thank you. I must ask,” he said, instead. “Have you been--have you been followed? Are you in any danger?”  
She shook her head. “No, I haven’t. And no, I’m not. Like I said, they think the Russians got the fish-man, an they think Strickland shot you and dumped your body somewhere. Lucky for you, Fleming was saying Strickland had been acting funny for weeks before he did what he did to you. The polite version of all this nonsense is that is the infection from his rotten fingers spread and got to his brain, and he went crazy.” She sighed. “They’re in the middle of hushing everything up right now. In a little while, you won’t even know anything w ever down there at all.”  
Dimitri listened to her speak, then nodded in satisfaction. 

Zelda seemed to remember she had the shoe still in her hand; when she looked at it, she made a little noise of dismay--she must have left fingernail marks in the leather, because she gently scrubbed at it with the pad of one thumb. Her face was sorry.  
A moment later she looked very pointedly down at the cheese wire still dangling from his hand.  
He made a very obvious show of rolling it up and slipping it into one of his trouser pockets.  
“A precaution. Please excuse me.” he said, in explanation.

She was still holding the shoe, and nodded in silent understanding. “Glad you hesitated this time.”  
Dimitri was glad, too--glad, for once, that his injuries had slowed him down. 

Zelda went back to the wall, where he could see there was a large series of unpainted, scuffed wooden cubbies. They lined most of the entire wall, but were very obviously not the sort of furniture intended for a domestic apartment. Each cubby had a pair of shoes in it, all well-cared-for and carefully organized. It looked as if Elisa had only been gone a few hours, rather than all that time--the whole tableau of her living space laid out like the contents of a dollhouse. 

After a moment, Zelda turned to him with a sigh. “She left a pair in her locker. I couldn’t bear to think of just leavin’ ‘em there, so I finally brought ‘em back. I figured she’d want to keep ‘em with the rest. That girl loves her some shoes. Though I don’t imagine she’ll be coming back for ‘em no time soon.” She looked over at the bathroom door; his eyes followed hers.  
The wood of the door’s jamb was swollen and the varnish blistered in several places, and the grout between the floor tiles streaked and flecked here and there with green.

Now that the panic and adrenaline had subsided, he could smell the place, too--a wet, green smell, marine but not unpleasant. Under that there was a gentle rose smell of old-fashioned perfume, nearly buried under the water smell. In his mind’s eye he saw an image of a rose arbor beside a river. 

Somehow the stink of wood rot had not caught up, yet; perhaps, as the temperatures had been falling, it had temporarily halted or slowed the mildew that was sure to develop.  
“The dried algae,” he said.  
Zelda nodded. She stepped closer to the bathroom. “He slept in there. Or rested, I suppose, I don’t know if he slept or…”

“All my research showed he had a sleep cycle comparable to an adult human’s,” he murmured.  
“Me and Giles came back afterwards and scrubbed the bathroom clean,” she explained. “Didn’t want nobody asking questions, in case they came snooping.”  
“That was very prudent of you.”  
“Oh, yeah? We figured so, too. ‘Cept, what with the way the rest of the place is, it didn’t seem to do no good.”

The floors in the rest of the apartment had the look of recent water damage, the boards lumpy an uneven underfoot, and the wood beginning to twist and cup into ridges here and there.  
For a moment they were so quiet they could hear the traffic outside, the booms from the cannon in the movie showing below.

“I got to wondering what happened to you,” Zelda said, very quietly. “When I heard what Strickland had done…” she trailed off. “Everyone knows you was one of the good ones. You were always nice and polite to everybody, and you didn’t act like we was your own personal help or nothin’. You were…you were decent.” She chuckled a little. “You were a helluva lot better to clean up after than most of them damn fools in that place.”

Dimitri bowed his head, embarrassed at how pleased this roundabout, too-late praise made him feel.  
“Now, don’t get nervous, but…I put two and two together after you told us your name,” she continued.  
For a moment he felt galvanized, like an ice-cold bolt of lightning ran through him.

Then he looked at her and was surprised when he saw the sorrow written all over her face. “But I guess, if you’d really been as bad as all that, they wouldn’t have let that man do what he did to you, and you wouldn't be here.”  
He said nothing, only sighed. He felt like he was sagging all over.  
“No,” he said in agreement. “I suppose not.” He hesitated again before murmuring, “I haven’t been squatting in Ms. Esposito’s apartment.”

He felt the need to explain himself, wanting to prove his sincerity and honesty.  
“Oh, I know,” Zelda said. “I’ve been here a couple times, since. Me and Giles sit down by the water, sometimes, just to talk. He didn’t mention you.”  
Dimitri smiled. “He wouldn’t have.”

She looked at him, then, but the look was decisive rather than fearful; he realize she was making her mind up about something. Then finally, she said, “How much trouble are you in, Dr.--Mr.--”  
“Just my name is fine, right now,” he said. “And, the amount depends. It depends on quite a few things,” he gave her a look that was somewhere between pleading and confidential.  
She nodded as if satisfied with something.  
“Let’s get you back over there,” she said. “You look about ready to fall over.”  
He sighed. “Would you like the long or the short version of the events, when we get there?”  
“Oh, lord have mercy…”

~

“And he gon’ turn around an look at _me_ like I’m gonna drop what I’m doin’ and wipe it up. Hell _no_! What you can do is turn around and get one of those napkins _right there_ by your own elbow and get up your own mess! What do I look like, somebody personal coffee spill wiper?”  
Dimitri laughed so hard he had to press a hand to his stomach and the other to his injure cheek, as he listened to Zelda tell scathing anecdotes about some of his former coworkers. He’d honestly had no idea what a nuisance some of them were to the staff in charge of maintaining the facility.  
“Callaghan always was ridiculous. I believe he’d do just about anything to avoid moving from behind his microscope.” Dimitri agreed.  
“Sure would! Shoot, if sittin’ in one place was a sport, he’d have himself a whole _cabinet_ full of trophies!” Zelda said. 

Between them on the kitchen table there was an interrupted game of cards, and on the stove behind them, a pot of chicken was stewing down in a creamy sauce. There was a smell of baking bread coming from the oven; the dinner rolls would be ready soon, though it had taken him longer than he was accustome to, since he’d had to knead the dough one-handed.

They paused a moment when they heard someone whistling in the hallway; Dimitri got up with a little difficulty and went to the door.  
Giles’s arms were full of art supplies, and he started talking as soon as Dimitri had the door closed, apparently without noticing Zelda at the table.

“Something smells _fantastic_. Did you--” Giles interrupted himself to walk around to where the couch was, setting bags down and shedding coat, scarf, and gloves as he went. “Oh! They want more displays for the holidays after this. Oh, my god, can you imagine! Imelda--the manager--said sometimes the general manager for Macy’s comes through there, and maybe...I don’t know what I would do if my work was on display in the front of a Macy’s. What would you do? --Do you approve?”

“From a political standpoint, no,” Dimitri said. Then he shrugged. “But from a financial standpoint, it seems like a solid decision.”  
“As solid a decision as someone mired in the capitalist rat race can make?” Giles asked, smirking.  
Dimitri smiled and shook his head.  
Zelda snorted a laugh, an Giles jumped and almost dropped his satchel, and then it was Dimitri’s turn to laugh a little.  
“Zelda is here.”  
“Yes, I see that! Hello, Zelda. So, I, er, you’ve seen--you’ve met--”  
“We’ve met,” she laughed. “’Dr. De Campos’ looks a lot like this man I use to see all the time at work. But I’m sure it’s just one of life’s strange coincidences.”  
She and Dimitri shared a look. 

Giles relaxed visibly, enough that he took a deep breath and said, “Well, at least now I know what smells so good!”  
“You can thank him for that,” Zelda said.  
“You don’t give yourself enough credit,” Dimitri protested. “Come sit with us, Giles.”  
“You can watch me finish whuppin’ him at cards.” Zelda said, smiling broadly.  
“That’s hardly fair--you know six different rule sets, and I only know the British rules!”

Zelda laughed and made a shooing gesture at him. “You’re the one who’s been traveling all over the world, and you come back here and tell me you only know one way to play this game! Let me tell you, me and my cousins and school friends had this game down pat. You couldn’t come to _our_ block with just them British rules, honey, ‘cause you’d leave _broke_!”  
Dimitri laughed helplessly and held out his hands in protest.

“You sat down at the wrong table, my friend,” Giles said to Dimitri. Dimitri gave him an inquiring look.  
“The only person who could even touch her at cards is Elisa.”  
Zelda was laughing and nodding, looking down at her hand of cards.

“He’s lucky he didn’t bet money!” she said to Giles. Then, back to Dimitri, “If you did, I’d’ve had to take you to the cleaner’s. It ain’t personal; it’s cards.” Then, back to Giles, “Giles, you go ahead and shuffle and deal; it’s your deck. Do you mind if I use your restroom?”  
“Oh, no, not at all. It’s there,” Giles gestured.

After the door had closed, Giles gave Dimitri another one of those old-friend-who-I-have-missed smiles, and Dimitri returned it, feeling inexplicably shy. Then he sighed and gently put the warm squirmy feeling away for later; he had something important to tell the other man. 

“She came over and I…I went to investigate. I thought it was someone else, looking for me. Listen, Giles--I realized that if they came, and they found me here, and I had to run--”  
“But you already said that wouldn’t happen,” Giles said. His face was ineffably gentle.  
Dimitri inhaled and exhaled, perhaps more harshly than he intended. Giles’s hands were still, the cards between his fingers motionless.

“If they came, and you weren’t here, it wouldn't be safe for you to return. Not to stay. You would have to be able to get the cats an get out in a hurry. Would you be able to do that?”  
“Well--” Giles started to protest, but he could see how important it was to him, and the words died in his throat. He only nodded, looking a little embarrassed, almost ashamed. “Well, all right.”  
“And I need to be able to leave you a sign. If I’m not here when you get back, and it’s because I had to run and this place is no longer safe--”  
“But there would I go?” Giles mumbled at last, and Dimitri realized he was _sad_. 

Everything snapped into abrupt focus. This apartment, these cats, the books, the window--this had all been Giles’ entire _life_ , the only environment he’d lived in. Dimitri didn’t even know how many year the man had lived in the place--ten? Fifteen? Thirty? And here he was, warning him he might have to abandon it all and run someplace else--with barely any money, at his age, and alone.

He had the sudden realization that _he_ could afford to do that, because he had the knowledge and expertise. Even injured as he was, now, he still knew how to hide, if necessary. He had already spent years living as other people, his own life stuffed into one footlocker and one rented room he hadn’t even set foot in in almost two years, now. 

The complete, stark difference between their lives was such a shock that he didn't even have an answer to Giles’ question.  
Instead, he made up his mind.

“Please. If you come back and I’m not here, and I leave a certain book on the kitchen table, it is because it’s not safe. Tell the police you’ve been burglarize and you suspect it will happen again, and they will keep an eye on this place. That should keep you safe.We can decide on a book later.” he hoped. American cops being cops meant that they were still corruptible--and being from where he was from, he was intimately familiar with crooked police officials. But it would at least give people something to think about, before coming after him. Again, it would--might!--give him enough time to draw their attention away from Giles.  
But he also realized, in the back of his mind, that he could not run; they would just torture Giles for information and then kill him anyway. Even in the best case scenario, he could hardly expect Giles to flee alone.  
He hoped it would never come to that. 

He made up his mind that Giles’s entire world was something too precious, and should be guarded as such, more jealously than a monarch with their jewels. He told himself he would never do anything that would endanger the fragile piece of Giles’s home. 

There was nothing else he could do. He determined that he would protect Giles or die trying.  
A few moments later, Zelda came back and they resumed their card game. He played worse than before; his thoughts were elsewhere, partly consumed by the fear that in his desperation he may have accidentally doomed the other man.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I solemnly promise that nothing really terrible will happen in this fic. This is a fix-it, and it will be a HAPPY one!


	6. Claire de Lune on a Night Without Stars

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A conversation between two friends in a park. Dimitri makes some important discoveries in an unexpected place. Our gentlemen finally get somewhere!

The park was cold, this time of year. Unfortunately it was also one of the few places where nobody paid anybody else much attention, an where Negro woman could walk side-by-side with white man and not receive stares or cruel remarks.

They passe a sleeping homeless person curled on a park bench and a harried-looking man in battered trousers and shapeless sweater, trying desperately to convince a small terrier to pee so he could go home.  
Zelda laughed, at that.

“Brewster and me use to have us a little yappy dog. Named him Tony, though I never could figure out why. I suppose he thought he’d be good little dog for the kids to play with, only we ain’t gotten round to havin' ‘em yet. --The kids, that is. And then I got to thinkin’, as if my feet ain’t tire enough from runnin’ around cleanin’ up after them nasty men at work. Then come home, fix lunch and dinner for Brewster--who don’t lift a hand except to flip through the TV guide--and pick up kids’ messes, too? No, thank you.”

Giles chuckle. “I never liked dogs much, myself. Too…messy, too much like having a toddler around. They put anything they can find in their mouths, they use the restroom on themselves at the drop of a hat, and then cry for _you_ to clean it afterwards--no. Frankly I’d take lazy husband an a cat over lazy husband an a dog any day. I don’t know how you did it.”  
Zelda laughed. “I have good friends who I can complain to,” she said, elbowing Giles in the side playfully.

“Good friends,” he echoed, smiling. “You’re right; if we didn’t take these walks, I think I’d go stir-crazy from sitting in front of my easel all day.”  
“Well, you got your company right now,” she said.

“Oh, yes, the--my house-guest. Well--I never--I don’t want to pester the poor fellow, he was already shot an--an robbed. I don’t want to dump anything else off on the poor man; his plate’s full enough as it is. At least you and I can bat thing back and forth; I’m pretty sure there are things he can’t tell me at all, or doesn’t want to talk about ever again.”

Zelda nodded, humming in agreement. “He didn’t deserve all that. I know they say life ain’t fair, but sometime you see something happen to someone and it just breaks your heart,” she said.  
Giles made a noise of agreement; they continued their slow ambulations around the quiet, nearly-deserted park in peace.

~

Giles had mentioned Barrett-Browning; Dimitri was certain of it. Only, now that he had finished Shakespeare's sonnets and was tired of Keats, he realize he had no idea where Giles had put the other volumes of poetry. 

He went to the big bookcase, with its glass-pane doors, and regarded it thoughtfully. The books were shelved every which way, with emphasis obviously being more on getting them onto the shelves than by any real system of organization--or, if there was one, he had not deciphered it yet.

The cat who had adopted him came and sat at his feet an meowed for attention. He knelt carefully and petted them, murmuring gently affectionate nonsense to them. 

From where he was kneeling, he looked around at all the furniture, and sighed a little.  
Everything Giles owned was cold an worn, but very well-kept, and of excellent quality; the bookcase, the couch, the kitchen table an chairs, the rug, they were all far too nice for him to have purchased them for this place. They implied a larger, more stately size, s well, s if they had been culled from large an fine collection, taken from a much bigger house and crammed into this cramped little apartment. He realized they were probably the last vestiges of Giles’s previous life.

The feeling of protectiveness flare again, along with mingled embarrassment that he ha tried to ask Giles to leave everything behind. If what Zelda had said was true, then the mess Strickland had made would close this up forever. That case wouldn’t be reopened or revisited, because to do so would bring an incalculable amount of negative attention down on both OCCAM an the American military. But old habits died hard, and he was beginning to think that perhaps he would never really clear those shadows out of his mind.  
He decided he would have to live with it. He wondered how long it had been since Giles had had rel money, and what had caused him to lose it. 

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the book he w looking for, behind two leaning sketchbooks and at the bottom of a precarious stack of other books. At the top of the stack was a copy of the Joy of Cooking. There were dried splatters of what looked like pasta sauce along the outside edge of the pages. He smiled, shaking his head, an carefully took the volume he wanted from the stack.

Elizabeth Barret Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese was like n old friend, one of his first favorite books in a foreign language from his college days. His own copy had been plainly bound in brown canvas, and nowhere near s formal and exquisite as Giles’s gilt-spine copy, with its gray linen binding.  
He stared at it for a moment, stroking the cover absently, before flipping it open. 

He could feel there was something between the pages, and between the pages with Sonnet 28 and Sonnet 29, he found an old photograph. Two men stood side-by-side in the driveway of a house with wood-shingle siding; behind them, a wood-paneled sedan with white-wall tires. Pine and fir trees stood behind the house. 

There it was, he thought. His proof--but proof against his own theory.  
It had been a very long time since he had been so happy to be wrong! So there was no deceased darling wife! He wondered what had happened to the man--lover? Partner? The excitement was enough that he had to set the book an photos down and take some deep breaths.

The world had not been kind to him, so far. Now, with this raft of hope as slender as a reed drifting towards him, he found himself wanting to grab it and cling to it. He hoped he wasn't making any incorrect assumptions; now, as on a mission, he could not afford to misinterpret the evidence he had gathered.

The date on the picture was 1949; and in the picture Giles was young, possibly younger than Dimitri was now. What had happened to the house? The car? How many turns had Giles’s life taken, before Dimitri had met him?

He frowned, but carefully replaced the photo in the book’s pages where he’d found it. Then, with an equal amount of care, he turned through the other pages, finding more photos of the two of them, and more of just the man. They were all taken earlier than the 1949 one taken in front of the house, however, and none of them seemed to have been taken at the house.  
He and the other man had been together for nearly five years, if the dates on the photos was accurate; many of the dates and notes on the backs of them appeared to be in the other man’s handwriting, as well. 

Giles would not have kept mementos of a man who he had left of his own volition; this much, Dimitri knew. He was one of the sorts of people who cling to whatever good pieces of the past he could, even if they were mingled with hurt. That meant the other man must have been the one who left Giles, and perhaps these photos were all he had left of their previous relationship.

Dimitri sighed and stroked the cat idly. “Did you know this man?” he asked.  
The cat turned away almost coyly. Dimitri smiled, a little sadly.

He knew his areas of expertise, and where they ended--he was the agent who did not do honeypot missions, who was too plain and unassuming to do anything but blend in and be a little mole in the background gnawing holes in the enemy’s books, to bring the knowledge home.

He was not the one who did the romancing, much less the one who _was_ romanced.  
His handful of relationships and were all with men as discrete as he, who had every reason for such discretion, and in his hands their secrets were safe--as long as _his_ were safe.  
He had not had a relationship in decades that did not come with it built-in fail-safes and methods of mutually-assured destruction. It had not only been impractical; it hadn’t even been _safe_.

So it was with a strange feeling that he realized how seriously he felt for the older artist.  
And Giles _was_ an artist, even though Dimitri suspected he thought of himself as a washed-up hack.

Dimitri felt both lucky and guilty for this discovery. He closed the book, his eyes going to the closed apartment door, an made his min up about something important. 

~

Giles woke up two mornings later, to the sound of the radiator clicking and clattering like a marching band drummer was practicing on it. A quick glance at his watch told him it was a little after four--no time at all to be awake, old radiators be damned.  
He huffed a sigh and rolled over.

He had not closed his eyes a minute, however, when he heard a soft, papery rustle. When he laid completely still for a long moment, the sound repeated itself, and again, until it clicked in his sleep-fogged brain that Dimitri was reading a book. 

Giles sat up, put his glasses on, and peered over the back of the couch. He surprised to see Dimitri sitting at the kitchen table, his chin propped on his good hand. He had a steaming cup with a teabag tag dangling out of it on a coaster near him, and a stack of books and a blank notebook Giles had given him spread out in front of him. 

Dimitri froze when he noticed Giles looking at him, then looked so pointedly nervous about something that Giles felt confuse for a long moment.  
“Is everything all right?” he mumbled. His voice was still thick with sleepiness.  
Dimitri nodded. “Sorry I woke you. I would have stayed in the room, but it’s a bit warmer here, nearer the radiator,” he explained. 

Then Giles felt like a heel again; he couldn’t even remember if he’d offered the poor guy more blankets, or if he’d just been creeping out of bed in the small hours of the morning to sit as near as the radiator as he could to avoid freezing.  
“That’s fine. Did you, er. Did you need some more blankets?”  
Dimitri shook his head. “No, thank you, I was fine.” 

Just outside the window, the rain was again ticking down with a sound like many implacable metronomes. For a moment it was utterly quiet.  
Giles didn't know what it was bout being cold that made you need to pee, but now that he was involuntarily awake, his bladder wouldn’t let him rest. He shuffled to his feet, stuffing his arms into his house robe’s sleeve, and went to the restroom. 

When he came back out, Dimitri had risen and gotten the kettle from the stove; Giles hadn't even noticed it there.  
“Would you like some tea?” he offered.  
“That would be great, actually,” Giles said. 

Somehow they ended up on the recently-vacated couch, teacups in hand, with the radio on. Giles had quickly discovered all the stations that played classical music, and his favorite was out of a college somewhere so far away that the music came through fuzzed, furred as if with frost.

“I really didn’t mean to wake you,” Dimitri chuckled a little, “But now I’ve taken your bed _and_ your couch from you.”  
Giles wanted to say that he’d give the man the shirt off his back if he needed it, but he only smiled a little, shaking his head. 

They listened to the radio in silence, the concert proceeding on. Even with the static of too great a distance, Debussy’s Claire de Lune came through, delicate as first snow.

Dimitri was still involved with the book of poetry he’d been reading; Giles hadn’t seen the title and besides, his eyes were too bleary with sleep to try to read along. He was thinking of sketching a park scene with two young lovers walking a dog, and was just beginning to imagine whether it would have been more charming for the dog to be something large and silly-looking, or a small, excited-looking creature, when Dimitri spoke. 

“Who is this?” Dimitri asked. When Giles turned to see what he was holding, he flinched so hard he nearly dropped his mug.  
Dimitri tilted the photograph slightly towards him, his eyes on the image. 

He must have found the Barrett-Browning 'Sonnets from the Portuguese--Giles remembered Dimitri having asked about it before. He _also_ remembered, with a sudden stab of dread, the reason _why_ that particular volume of poetry had been buried behind so much other stuff; he’d been using it to store old photos, things he really ought to have burned, but hadn't had the courage to get rid of. Some of them were the only reminders that he’d had a life before the tiny apartment over the theater.

In the photo Dimitri was holding, Giles was forty years younger, his dark hair tousled slightly; he stood with his arm around the shoulders of another man, whose arm was looped comfortably around Giles’s waist. He could remember the warmth of Bernie’s hand in his pants’ back pocket, the dear--and dearly departed--friend who had held up her old camera an told them to strike a pose in front of their new honeymoon house. It had been summer in the Maryland countryside, humid in the way that suggested trips to the beach or lazy lounging on shady porches. They’d both just gotten hired by the same marketing firm and had the promise of good-paying, full-time work. The future had seemed so bright; they’d bought the house because it was within an easy twenty-minute commute to the city and had had beautiful windows and a lovely yard, so full of trees it looked like a small forest.

The well of memory was so deep that for a long, painful moment he just sat there, staring down at it, the sadness eating up the present. He wondered, not for the first time, if maybe if he hadn’t clung so hard to the other man, then Bernard wouldn’t have eventually pushed him out of his life so thoroughly; that maybe they’d still have their little house on the outskirts of town, with their little stand of trees and Bernie’s new wood-paneled Packard in the driveway. He figured things were about to go the same way with Dimitri, despite the fact that he hadn’t said a single flirtatious word to Dimitri--not intentionally, anyway. 

He realize abruptly that Dimitri was looking at him now, his face carefully neutral. 

Giles felt the embarrassment crawl up his throat hot as bile. Still, feeling more weary than sad, he muttered, “A picture of myself and an…old friend. Taken a long time ago, before I fell on hard times an wound up…here,” he said, raising one hand to gesture around.

Dimitri nodded, as if mentally digesting the words. Then, very gently, he said, “It must have been nice, to have been such close friends with someone that you moved into a home together.”

Giles had been looking at him askance, halfway-ready to be up and off the couch if Dimitri showed any signs of disgust, but he was completely unprepared for such gentleness, the tacit acknowlegement of what the picture really meant.

“That was--that was one of the last time he allowed the two of us to be photographed together. We…got jobs at the same agency, and then everything…went sideways. Times were changing, he insisted, and the country was…not the sort of place where you could do that sort of thing anymore. Not in the open.”

“Not outside of closed doors, or college dormitory rooms, either, I’d wager. Or is that brief period of exploration forbidden in this country, as well?” Dimitri asked him. The question hung in the air like web of implications and hints, subtle as perfume.  
Giles was silent for a moment, utterly unsure what to say next. 

“Dimitri--are you trying to tell me you--” Giles began.  
Dimitri inclined his head slightly, the gentlest of nods. Giles felt a bloom of warmth in hsi chest so powerful it flattened his breath out of him. He blurted, “What happened to you? I mean, you and your—your friend?” he asked.  
Finally Giles looked at Dimitri directly.  
His eyes were tired and gentle, and very sad. 

“My first lover’s name was Konstantin. We attended the same college. He was very tall and handsome and he had black hair and brown eyes; he was going to school to be an architect, before the war destroyed all of that. He ended up the navy. Submarine. They disappeared somewhere off the coast of a country that you won’t find on any American map.”  
Giles hesitated a moment, then covered Dimitri’s hand with his own and squeezed gently.

“There were others after him, but with my work, I could never…have anything that went anywhere. I gave up and resigned myself to...” he shook his head. “I put most of my energy into my work, instead.”

Dimitri turned his hand over and laced their fingers together, and Giles felt like his heart would burst.  
On the radio, the pianist was continuing to wring more pathos out of the instrument, as if determined to make the listener cry from the beauty.  
They sat side by side under their separate blankets, holding hands. 

Giles was the first one to speak, murmuring in a voice that was thickened with emotion.  
He squeezed Dimitri’s hand once, very gently. “I--I didn’t want to presume…”  
“You know, historians continue to unearth evidence that homosexuality was common an normal in ancient times. I’m not speaking exclusively of the ancient Greeks and Romans, either,” Dimitri said. His voice was low n very soft, the timbre hitting Giles somewhere in the middle of the chest. “In most cases these artifacts never make it to meet the eyes of the public. In the early 19th century, when the craze for antiquities was at its height, museum curators began either destroying or deliberately mislabeling an then ‘losing’ an uncountable number of artworks in their storage facilities, because they were concrete proof against the idea that homosexuality was a modern aberration, rather than a natural, normal extension of human sexual expression and identity.”

Giles was nothing if not quick-witted, even if usually to his own detriment, but at this time he managed quickly enough. “I could have sworn you said you _didn’t_ have your PhD in history.”

Dimitri laughed, and shifted closer, eliminating the last arm’s length of distance between them.  
It was embarrassing how Giles felt equally gratified, relieved, and overjoyed when Dimitri sighed softly and rested his temple on Giles’s shoulder. He realized he could--he could lean over him, could rest his cheek on top of his head, smell his hair--the hope that this single half-embrace could grow into a relationship shot through his body like the electricity of life itself, making his fingertips tingle an his breath come short. Just as he was nerving himself up to ask how far things could go, Dimitri began speaking again.

“I spent almost a week thinking you were a widower and secretly dreading the day I would accidentally find pictures of your deceased wife, afraid you would mention her.”  
Giles tilted his head away to look t the top of Dimitri’s head, huffing a laugh, impossibly. “You…you really thought that I…”

Then Dimitri lifted his face to Giles’s, his chin resting on Giles’s shoulder. “You’re a good man, Giles. Good men are very thin on the ground, these days. Anyone would be lucky to be with you.”

Giles managed to look away, then, the embarrassment too strong. “Well. You don’t need to worry about any competition in that department. There hasn’t--I can’t even--there hasn’t been anyone who would even look at me twice in--”

Dimitri had shifted around slightly and was turned more towards Giles; his free hand gently touched the other side of Giles’s face and tilted it down to look at Dimitri again.  
Dimitri and his mournful eyes, the color of a rainy sky in the low light from the kitchen. 

“I’ve looked at you, more than twice.” his eyes went from Giles’s eyes to his mouth and back again, a slow, meaningful circuit.  
“Do you want to--”  
“--May I kiss you?” Dimitri asked. 

Giles nodded, glad his mouth hadn't caught up with his brain yet, and he fought the urge to crush Dimitri in an embrace when Dimitri pressed a gentle, chaste kiss to his lips.  
“I don’t have anything to offer you,” he protested, when they separated for breath. “I mean, really--what--what you see is what you get--that easel is the newest piece of furniture I own, I don’t--can’t go on vacations, don’t have a fancy car--I don’t even have stable work, most of the time--” 

Dimitri kissed the corner of his mouth, gently. “Can’t I just have this? With you?”  
Giles whimpered, helpless with happiness. “Well, I suppose--I suppose, when you put it _that_ way. You drive a hard bargain.”  
On the radio, the music continued, and outside, so did the rain.  
Neither of them moved from the couch until the sky began to lighten with dawn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading. Your encouraging comments have been my lifebread and the wind under my wings.   
> I love you all~


	7. A Simple Thing, Yet I Wept For It

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dimitri actually really does have depression. Giles is very understanding. Breakfast and poetry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all again for reading, and for your beautiful comments. I hope you enjoy this chapter too. :)

Chapter 7

The change from ‘artist’s garret’ to ‘artist’s icebox’ seemed determined to happen sooner rather than later.  
Dimitri woke up one morning, glanced at the little clock, and silently congratulated himself on having finally made it to five o’clock. The cat who h been napping with him protested when he rolled over; he stroked the creature’s ears gently and then immediately wished he hadn’t moved the blankets off when he sat up. His skin prickled up into goose-flesh instantly, his shoulder injury feeling like ice-cold bristles of glass filled the healing wound. He groaned softly, gasping with pain when he tried to move his hand.  
On the nightstand, Giles had left him a glass for water and the bottles of his medicine.

Giles was sleeping--still on the couch, Dimitri’s injuries be damned--and he levered himself out of bed carefully to avoid disturbing the cat any further. The feline in question crept underneath the tartan blanket head-first, intent on sopping up whatever leftover body-heat they could get. He snorted a laugh and shook his head, amused despite the pain.  
“You treacherous little thing,” he said, “Pretending to love me so you can steal my warm spot in bed.”

The blanket tented up where the cat lifted their head and turned it in his direction.  
It was a struggle to get his injured arm into the sleeve of the borrowed terrycloth robe, but he was glad of the extra layer. 

He shook his head, still smiling, then limped into the bathroom. He took the glass and his medicine, and, as an afterthought, the Barrett-Browning volume from the dresser as he went.  
After taking the pills, he swallowed a glass of water like a fish, half-disbelieving how thirsty he had been, and how dry his mouth was. 

He sat on the closed toilet lid and smoked and read poetry, taking care to tap the cigarette’s ash into the sink. The medicine took the edge off the pain in his shoulder, but he realized a bit ruefully that all the talk about severe scars and broken bones being able to sense cold, and old people’s joints being good barometers, was actually all too true. 

Giles had taken the photos from the book, and put them in a tin Elisa had given him as a gift--a genuine antique French tin with a Mucha print on its embossed brass-colored lid. This had gone onto a shelf on the bookshelf.  
Dimitri read the sonnets and wondered if the book--and the entire set, by extension--had been gifts the other man ha given Giles, or something Giles himself had bought, to lend his home office a touch of dignity a much as for personal reading. 

When the chill in the bathroom was bad enough that the robe wasn’t keeping it off anymore, he stood up, soaked his cigarette butt in the sink, and tossed it in the trash. He tucked the Barrett-Browning in the crook of his arm like an infant and stepped out of the bathroom, into an apartment just brightening with dawn. 

He made breakfast as if sleepwalking: hard-boiled eggs, a kettle of hot water for tea. He missed the smokiness of the teas back home; even now, years and years since he’d last set food on the continent, he was still not entirely accustomed to foreign tea. Every time he brewed a pot, the smell and taste came as a shock. Better teas were usually English or Indian, difficult to find, hellishly expensive luxuries that Dr. Robert Hoffstetler had allowed himself, now and again, but even they had none of the richness or smoky flavor of the Russian teas he missed so much.  
He wanted to tell Giles everything about home--his grandmother’s old silver samovar with its brass lion feet, his mother’s glass teacups with the silver handles.

The realization opened up in front of him as suddenly s a canyon in the dark: the future with a new lover, old things made new by his sharing them again. What could he tell Giles? How much would be safe? Perhaps if he was cautious and avoided names…  
Giles would love to hear about Minsk, the wide avenues, the brick-paved squares. 

Every memory edged towards pain, however, an this one was knotted up with the terrible feeling/knowledge that he could never introduce Giles to his parents or friends. He entertained himself with the fantasy of bringing him home, knowing Giles would exclaim over the little brick house, the wood furniture, the old-fashioned tiled stove heater downstairs with the painted tiles imported all the way from the Netherlands by his grandfather. Everything in the house had been like a jewel; his mother was a consummate homemaker, and not so much as one basket of rolls ever went to their table without a beautifully-embroidered cloth lining it.

He could taste her special poppy-seed dinner rolls in the back of his mouth, could see them piled golden and waiting on a tray, her favorite linen towel with cross-stitched birds on it.  
When he swallowed, his throat ache with the fierceness of incoming tears; his vision swam a moment, n he had to close his eyes an clutch the countertop to stay upright.  
He went quietly to the bathroom and wept, still silent, with a handful of the robe’s sleeve mashed over his lips to cover the sound. He had not been so wracked with memories and loss in years; the absence of work an the sudden closeness of new happiness had pushed him over the edge.

~ 

He was toasting bread in a frying pan when Giles groaned softly from the couch and sat up.  
“Good morning,” Dimitri said, and was about to congratulate himself on keeping his voice steady when something else betrayed him instead.  
“Good morning to you, too,” Giles mumbled.

The taller man shuffle carefully into the kitchen, fixing his glasses, and then stopped short when he was close enough to see Dimitri’s face clearly.  
“Are you--are you in pain? Have you been--” he gestured at his own face, at his eyes, as if to directly ask if he’d been weeping would insult Dimitri.  
Dimitri sucked in a tremendous breath, and then made the thrilling, terrifying decision to just come right out with the truth.

“I was…upset. I was thinking,” he said. “I…about my parents. I think of them very often. Worries, mostly, which I can do nothing to assuage or dispel, as I have no way of contacting them. Even when I was…working…anything I sent back to them could have been intercepted and…well. It was never safe.”  
“Oh,” Giles said, very softly. Then, “Were you very close?”  
Dimitri wiped his eyes with the heel of one hand and nodded. 

Giles’s big hand on his back was a pleasant surprise; he twitched all over and tensed up, uncertain of how to even accept comfort from another person.  
For so long his solitary pleasures had been boiled down to his work, or reading, or occasional furtive drawings for enjoyment; this last went nowhere, as Dr. Robert Hoffstetler was not the type to frequent art galleries or anything of the sort. Sometimes he would make (usually regrettable) attempts to see a movie, but most American cinema was either too wide-eyed and falsely naive, or too commercial and slick, for his tastes: both too brainless and too glib, everything geared towards aiming a product at consumers. Television was no better. He’d once sat through three minutes of a television program about a housewife trying desperately to hide something from her husband; the big reveal was that she had changed coffee brands and didn’t want him to find out. The commercial had come complete with laugh-tracks and built-in moments where she looked straight into the camera with an exasperated expression; for a long moment he’d assumed it was actually a new sitcom.  
He had taken the television set back to the store the next day.

Now, shed at last of any means of funneling the stress out of himself, it was bubbling up in other ways, seeking any crack to seep from. He felt like a volcano with a blocked cone, spurting molten rock from seams in his sides. 

He had the presence of mind to take the frying pan off the stove before turning to Giles and slowly wrapping his arms around the other man, wondering if it was acceptable to cling.  
Giles said nothing, only continued stroking his back.  
“I feel like I’m going out of my head,” he mumbled, into the front of Giles’s robe. 

“You almost died,” Giles said, his voice incredibly gentle as he rubbed Dimitri’s back an shoulders. “A fellow is allowed to feel like he’s going out of his head, after what you went through. Hell, some fellows don’t even NEED a big incident like that to go out of it! Some poor bastards just…bottle the little ones up for years, then one day they can’t take it anymore and you read their obituaries the next week, with no mention that they shot themselves in the face or hanged themselves in their basements or closets.” Giles paused a moment, then added hastily, “I--I’m glad you aren’t doing…anything like that.”

Dimitri could feel the secret, the shame, bulging at the backs of his teeth. Molten rock. Volcanoes with blocked cones often blew out their sides, destroying themselves in the effort to release the implacable pressure.  
He sucked in a trembling breath, hoping Giles’s response to his next words would be the same gentleness. 

“I…did think about that. Once. I…it was awhile ago. I hadn’t seen my parents in a very long time, and I think that was the first time I genuinely came close to realizing I--I would never--I would never see them again,” he managed. Every word threatened to choke him; his throat was closing up with tears. “I was going to slit my wrists to the elbow and lay in a hot bath until I bled to death, but I couldn’t--bring myself to make the first cut. I had the razors all lined up…I…”  
“I’m so sorry,” Giles said. “And I’m so glad you didn’t.”  
He just held Dimitri, not letting go.

Dimitri made a complicated noise of pain, n his goo hand came up and grasped a handful of the back of Giles’s robe; he held on and just wept, honestly and openly, like a child.  
He was achingly aware of every kiss Giles pressed to his head, his ears, the way the other man’s hands skated up the back of his neck as if he was counting the vertebrae there, like ivory beads or pearls under his skin.  
Giles kept up a steady litany of murmuring, “It’s all right…it’s okay…”  
They stood there, Giles’s arms wrapped around him an Dimitri feeling hollowed out and scraped clean on the inside, an safer and more wanted an loved than he ha felt in years, until his side began to ache an he had to sit own.

They ate breakfast one-handed, Giles refusing to let go of Dimitri’s hand or stop touching him, an he thought of the supposed Vena Amoris--the vein of love that runs straight from the tip of the ring finger an to the heart, an artery as sure a conduit of love as any.  
“Please excuse me,” Dimitri muttered, wiping his nose with a paper towel. He couldn’t stop sniffling. “I’ve made myself ridiculous. I just wanted to tell you about where I grew up, and instead I ended up going completely to pieces like this.”

Giles w giving him the old-friend-who-I-have-missed smile again, this time tinged with sadness. He gently squeezed Dimitri’s hand.  
“You don’t have to shy away from the truth of how you feel, here,” he said. Then, “If it’ll make you feel any better, you could still tell me about where you grew up. I love the idea of seeing new places. It’s just that pesky, tedious, uncomfortable business of TRAVEL that I can’t stand…”  
Dimitri made a little snort of laughter in spite of himself. 

“I was thinking of how much you’d love the way my mother decorated our house.”  
“Ohh, she was an interior designer! Probably where you got your art smarts from, huh? Do tell, please!”  
He wiped his face again, sniffling and somehow smiling a little. “She would never have referred to herself that way, but yes, she was. An an excellent hostess, s well. You would have--you would like her.”  
“Does she look like you?”  
“Yes, actually. Small and plump with dark brown hair.”

Giles’s smile was like the warmth radiating off the tiles of their antique heater. “Tell me about her. If you feel all right about it, I mean. And…tell me about how she decorated your house.”  
Dimitri smiled at him, smiled through tears and past his smudged, cracked glasses, and thought about luck, and love, and second chances.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title is taken from Elizabeth Barrett-Browning's Sonnet 28, from Sonnets from the Portuguese, which is as follows:
> 
> My letters! all dead paper, ... mute and white ! —  
> And yet they seem alive and quivering  
> Against my tremulous hands which loose the string  
> And let them drop down on my knee to-night.  
> This said, ... he wished to have me in his sight  
> Once, as a friend: this fixed a day in spring  
> To come and touch my hand ... a simple thing,  
> Yet I wept for it! — this, ... the paper's light ...  
> Said, Dear, I love thee; and I sank and quailed  
> As if God's future thundered on my past.  
> This said, I am thine — and so its ink has paled  
> With lying at my heart that beat too fast.  
> And this ... O Love, thy words have ill availed,  
> If, what this said, I dared repeat at last!
> 
>  
> 
> I feel like Giles would love her poetry, and this poem in particular, but would keep with it the pain of earlier rejection, unable to separate the two because clinging to the past is, like, his Thing. I love my sad art grand-uncle and want him to be happy ;__;
> 
> Also, i read some of the novel, and that's where i read about Dimitri's near-suicide attempt, his terrible loneliness, and his other emotional breakdowns. It's heartbreaking and has cemented my love for him as a character, and my firm belief that he is a hero.


	8. What Do You Do All Day? (I Think About You)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A doctor's appointment for our Russian doctor. Making out and washing dishes. Our gentlemen finally get somewhere in bed!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh yeah so the sex is explicit. If you thought i was going to politely cut away, i am not. We both watched a movie where a woman had sex with a fish-amphibian-god-man, right? Yeah, so a middle aged guy and an old guy getting it on aren't that big of a deal by comparison. 
> 
> (I hope you like it. Really it's nothing wild.)

Dimitri frowned thoughtfully as he examined his reflection.   
This time, the man in the mirror was one he had not seen in awhile, but still someone he recognized.  
Normally he disliked having facial hair--it was itchy sometimes, and he was always vaguely anxious that he had some food caught in either his moustache or his beard--but he had to admit that he bore very little resemblance to poor deceased (or, more accurately, disappeared) Dr. Hoffstetler. 

He’d trimmed it and evened it up in some places, so he no longer looked like a partially-shaved badger, and though the wound in his face was healed enough that he could have taken the bandage off, he’d found that he liked the way people’s eyes skated away from his when they saw it. Americans hated to acknowledge injured or infirm people, except as curiosities that could be stared at; and even then, the handicap was the only thing they would remember. Show them a one-handed man playing a beautiful song on the piano and all they would remember was that a one-handed man had played the piano.   
Slightly hunched posture and a constant inward, studious look completed the ‘disguise’. 

Dr. Julio de Campos was a quiet, meek, hesitant man; he had come to America to look for new surroundings and a job, and had met with adversity almost immediately--first with his inability to find a place to practice medicine, and then by being attacked by muggers. He had no family but a younger half-sister who lived in in Toluca, with whom he had not spoken since they were both in their twenties. The fictitious lost ring had been a wedding band--fitting, he felt, since the first man he had ever loved was dead. He was a widower and the fictitious ring had been a memento. 

When he’d told Giles this, the man had stared at him before remarking, “You know, you could write that down and publish it and make a fortune. I’d pay just to read the dust-jacket of that book.”  
Dimitri had laughed. “It’s not too much?”  
“No, no. I think the ring is a very human, poetic touch. Very moving.” Giles had said. 

The Mexican-Spanish accent was effortless, in large part because in addition to English, he also spoke Spanish fluently. He had once spent two years in Mexico studying a particular species of rare monkey.

The population was decimated when a crooked politician had sold the forested land--their only known habitat--to an American agribusiness company, who proceeded to level the forest to make space for several massive cattle feedlots. 

He didn’t mention any of this to Giles--not yet, anyway. Maybe at some point, years in the future when the fear of the danger wasn’t fresh, he could share these stories with him. 

“Are you really sure you have to go back?” Giles said. His eyes were pleading.   
Dimitri moved a little closer to him, please that they were eye-to-eye--even if Giles _WAS_ sitting down at his easel stool to even out the height difference.  
He took Giles’s hands from where the older man was anxiously rubbing them on his pants’ legs, and squeezed them gently.

“I need the crutch; it will help with the identity.” He didn’t add that he was worried he’d suffered permanent muscle and nerve damage n would have a limp for the rest f his life; that particular threat hovered in the air like a faint bad smell that threatened to worsen if thought about too hard.  
“You mean your disguise?”

Dimitri gave Giles a crooked little smile. “No real agent calls their covers that,” he said.  
“Well, then, I guess Mr. Bond got it wrong,” Giles said.   
Dimitri snorted. “Maybe not. Mr. Bond is British, and usually played by the most handsome actor available, when I can tell you from personal experience that sticking out like a sore thumb in a flashy suit is _not_ a trick any real agent uses!”

They both laughed at that, Giles stroking the backs of Dimitri’s hands with his thumbs.   
“You’ll be careful?”  
“As careful as I can be,” Dimitri said, lifting their joined hands to kiss Giles’s knuckles.   
“If anything happens, I won’t breathe a word. You’ll be safe,” he’d promised. He’d kissed Giles again, to seal it, and then said, “If I come back and you’re not here, what’s the book?”  
Giles had rubbed his back, telegraphing his unhappiness with how he moved his hands. “The big Shakespeare volume. It’ll be open to Romeo and Juliet.”  
Dimitri had nodded, his forehead bumping Giles’s clavicle. “I look forward to not seeing it.”

~

Nothing happened; no one was much interested in a small, shabbily-dressed man who had obviously fallen on hard times. 

The bus driver sneered at his accent when he asked if the bus went near the hospital, and Dimitri--Dr. De Campos--felt the hurt like a slap in the face, but tamped down his injured pride. He half-expected the driver to tell him to sit at the back of the bus, but after giving him a dirty up-an-down look, the man only nodded.

The hospital was equally, mercifully uneventful: he sat virtually ignored in a crowded waiting room for two torturous hours before finally they saw him, and another thirty sitting in a chilly examination room with faded anatomical posters tacked to the walls. There was no window to have caused the fading; he wondered how long they had been in the room. 

The doctor was a pale, harried man somewhere on the younger side of forty, and had the red-rimmed eyes and slightly tremulous speech of the chronically sleep-deprived. He took a look at his charts, performed a hasty examination, and told him what Dimitri already knew--which was that his recovery was going as expected. He frowned at the chart and the paperwork for a moment, then made a decisive noise.

The stitches in Dimitri’s face and mouth were ready to come out; he called a nurse in and they removed them. The injury in his abdomen was doing much better, but would of course require more time. Dimitri wanted to protest that the sutures were hardly doing any good at that point, but elected against it; he wanted very much just to blend in. He thought for a moment about pointing out that HE was a doctor, but already suspected he’d be met with the same open suspicion or even disbelief that the first nurse had given him, and he was not keen on attracting that kind of attention.

Once finished with that, the doctor scribbled something on a piece of prescription note-pad paper, and stood up and mumbled something apologetic in Dimitri’s direction. He tore off the paper and thrust it at him and walked hastily out of the office.

Dimitri took the scrip to another office, where some other people took measurements, and where, in the thirty or so minutes that he was there, he learned more about American football than he ever wanted to know just by listening to two orderlies who were mopping a stretch of hallway just outside the waiting room. 

Finally, after what felt like an entire year, a nurse brought up a pair of crutches; these were fitted in a matter of moments so brief that it made the earlier wait seem surreal. The trip down to the pharmacy to get more medicine, and the bus ride home, passed in a blur that did not abate until he was in the hallway, whistling ‘Edelweiss’ in the hallway to signal Giles he was coming in. 

Giles hesitated just within arm’s reach as soon s the door was closed, obviously worried he was pressing too close; Dimitri just stepped up closer to him and slipped his uninjured arm around Giles’s waist, breathing in deeply.  
The taller man’s arms came around him slowly, smoothing over his shoulder blades and down his back; Dimitri closed his eyes.  
“So how’d the doctor’s office visit go? Not bad, I take it.”  
“I was perfectly invisible,” Dimitri said, smiling. 

For a late lunch they had chicken sandwiches on wheat bread he’d made, and he spent the entire meal smiling in pleasure as Giles exclaimed over how good the bread was.  
“That’s because most American bread in supermarkets these days isn’t even baked--just steam-cooked and then bagged, so it already has no flavor because it hasn’t had time to rise properly, and by the time it makes it to the market, it tastes more like pillow stuffing than food.”

Giles wiped a dab of mayonnaise away from one corner of his mouth, his eyes doing the old-friend smile. “Of course you have _views_ on food, too.”  
“Of course,” Dimitri agreed. “A country works on its stomach. The people, the working people, deserve good food.”

~

Later, after lunch, they stood side-by-side in front of the sink, washing dishes from lunch and breakfast. Giles washed and Dimitri dried, neatly stacking them to the side.  
The TV was chattering pleasantly, mindlessly behind them, an it had begun to rain. There were almost no sounds from the street, and the movie downstairs had a low, languorous soundtrack, with a lot of slow trumpets an horns.   
“Wonder when it will finally start to freeze,” Giles mumbled.

Dimitri hummed a little beside him, wringing his hands dry on a towel. He rested his head on Giles’s shoulder and Giles stood very, very still, afraid he would move.  
Then he jumped and almost dropped the cup he was washing when he felt the other man slip one hand into his back pocket.   
“Excuse me,” Dimitri said, an started to pull away. Giles sighed, helpless, and caught Dimitri’s face with one wet, soapy hand to pull him in for a kiss.   
“I’m used to being the uncertain one,” Giles confessed. “I don’t--I’ve been trying not to scare you off!”  
Dimitri was the one who laughed, then.   
“You know,” he said, “I don’t have a gaping wound in my face or mouth anymore…”  
This was how they ended up back in the ‘bedroom’, lying side-by-side.

“I…Well,” Giles said, eloquently, and then Dimitri’s lips were on his again, slow and deliberate. Careful, Giles thought, but he wondered if he was moving so slow because he was injured or because he didn’t want Giles to pull away.

Giles didn’t WANT to pull away. His hands were still hot an damp from wshing the dishes, and wandering all over Dimitri’s back, smoothing over the borrowed cardigan he was wearing and gathering lint with every pass.   
But he could feel the solid shape of Dimitri’s back through the soft, thick yarn, and it was marvellous--

Dimitri cut straight to the chase and was gently moving one hand under his shirt, skimming one of his nipples with warm fingertips, and Giles jumped and jerked forward, gasping in delighted surprise like he was a college kid again.

“Too much?” Dimitri asked, but this time with a languid smile.  
“Where did you--Weren’t you SHOT?”  
Dimitri shrugged his good shoulder. “I’m Russian.”

Giles laughed aloud then, dipping in for another kiss. Dimitri moved the hand that was on his chest to his back, curling blunt-nailed fingers against the skin there in a way that made the hair on the back of his neck prickle in pleasure. 

“What’s THAT supposed to mean?”  
“I used to know this young man, in college, whose family estate was overrun every year by bears.”  
“I take it none of them were marksmen?”  
Dimitri snorted in feigned incredulousness. “Why would you shoot a perfectly good bear? They caught them alive and sold them to zoos.”

Giles gaped at him for a minute, and while he ws tring to figure out if Dimitri ws teasing him or not, the other man leane forwrd to nibble his lower lip.   
Finally Giles managed, “So that’s it, then. Do you--just--take everything in stride?”  
He was trying to get words in edgewise between kisses, with Dimitri clinging to him like some clothed daytime succubus with hands roaming under his clothes. 

“Most things,” he said. “Although, near-death experiences, I have learned, give you a renewed appreciation for some of the simple things about life.”  
He slid his hand down his back and into Giles’s pants again, and Dimnitri pressed himself up against Giles fully, making his renewed appreciation for life very, very clear.  
“This is simple?” Giles asked.  
“Oh, yes, I think. It’s the most natural thing in the world.”  
“Yes, and I suppose heart-attacks are, as well,” Giles said. “Good god, you’re…you… _oh_ …”

“I have been very, very patient,” Dimitri murmured, almost against Giles’s mouth.  
“Well, you’ve certainly been a model PATIENT, as well. No strenuous activity, no…oh, my god, yes, you certainly need some--some--”  
“--Relaxation,” Dimitri finished. 

Giles’s whole brain was absolutely swimming in arousal. He didn’t know when Dimitri got his belt off or how, precisely, his hand ended up switching from his back pocket to being in his pants, palming his cock with a sure, soft, hot grip--

“What about you?” Giles asked, his voice rough.   
“Do you have any lubricant?”  
“Vaseline okay?”  
Dimitri huffed a little, laughing. “Do you have to get up to get it?”   
“No! Thank goodness. It’s just here,” Giles said, rolling over carefully. 

Dimitri hummed in assent and waited for Giles to twist the lid off the container before dipping three fingers in. He rolled the dollop on his fingers against his palm for a long moment to warm it, and when he ws satisfied reached for Giles again.  
“Don’t you want me to--” Giles said, gesturing at the front of Dimitri’s pants, dishevelled with the evidence of his own arousal.  
“Of course. Please,” Dimitri said.

It was a little awkward at first (Giles hadn’t done it in longer than he cared to remember) but he got Dimitri’s cock out of his pants without incident other than Dimitri making this sort of moan-whine high in his throat. His head tipped forward and his grip clenched convulsively around Giles’s dick. Then he tipped his head back and Giles kissed him, still frustratingly chaste.  
“I wish I could,” Dimitri said. “It’s still--tender.”

The word ‘tender’ made Giles’s dick jump in his grasp; Dimitri smiled and pressed closer, somehow. His knees bumped Giles’s thighs.   
“Oh, my god, what I bet you could do with your mouth,” Giles mumbled. He felt like he was swimming, like his insides were molten.   
“Wait awhile and I’ll show you,” Dimitri murmured. 

Giles sped his hand up, angling his hand slightly. “How do you like it?”  
“That’s fine,” Dimitri breathed, “Lovely. Please, just--keep doing that.”  
Giles thought he would be the one to come undone first, but it was Dimitri, with a high, soft little sound and his face pressed into Giles’s chest.   
He followed Dimitri moments later, chasing orgasm like a rabbit down a hole into blessed hot darkness, and the soft warmth of Dimitri’s breath against his neck and throat.


	9. What Do You Do All Day? (I Think About You, Too)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Giles goes to work, finds acceptance with strangers, and makes friends. More light shed on Giles's past, but only in memory.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I agonized over this chapter for a long time, mostly because I didn't want to make it seem like i was using the Daughters of Bilitis, a real, and very important early gay rights group, as set dressing in a fanfic.  
> But the canon itself is compelling in that it injects fantasy elements into reality and it DOES use very serious issues as the backdrop for the story. Then again, it also handles even the fantasy elements with the kind of seriousness that Guillermo del Toro always uses. I don't even pretend to be on that level, but I DO subscribe to the idea that there's not necessarily anything wrong with telling the truth that would have been behind a story.

The walk to the shop later that day was harder than usual. Twice he paused and fiddled with his watch and considered dashing to the nearest payphone, calling Imelda and making up some contrived nonsense so he could go back home and spend the day with Dimitri instead. 

Imelda was just settling behind the counter when Giles got there, case under one arm and umbrella under the other: a wet, slushy rain was falling, turning everything a morose, linty gray. He held a thermos of coffee Dimitri had packed for him tucked in the crook of one arm, like a parcel of treasure.  
“Hello, Giles!” Imelda said.  
“Good afternoon!” he said, struck by the sensation that he was late an she was going to give him an earful. 

But she only gave him her usual smart smile. She had a catalogue of what looked like fabric samples open on the long, wide wooden counter, an was flipping through it. He could see she had a small notepad off to one side, and was taking notes of something.

Imelda was a plump, serious-looking woman who reminded him very much of those old Victorian dames not seen any longer. She was somewhere in her fifties, at his best guess, with aquiline features that reminded him of a Roman woman from a Raphaelite painting. She wore skirts that showed exactly one inch of leg above her ankles, sharply tailored blouses that buttoned up to the neck, and her hair in a stiffly-pomaded pompadour which she dyed jet black: the only conceit of hers he could see. 

Today she was wearing a plum-colored ensemble with black buttons that had tiny white stripe on them, and an abstract art-deco-styled black and white brooch that looked like a bird made of crumpled paper.  
Behind her there were a series of cubbies, all with bolts of various types of fabrics arranged in them like an old dry-goods store. Everything was paneled in lustrous dark wood. Across from the front desk there was a little bench, upholstered in plum-colored suede, and a few racks and mannequins wearing beautifully-tailored women’s suits and dresses. 

The backdrops he’d been painting were like triptych screens, blocking out most of the outside light, leaving the place lit only by a series of frosted-glass hanging lamps that threw yellow circles of light on the floor and cast a butter-colored glow everywhere. The shop was long and narrow, with the fitting rooms at the back. A discreet back door opened into an alley that led to another street.

Outwardly the place just looked like a nicer boutique clothing store, but Giles had spent enough time there, innocently painting his backdrops, to have noted a few things.  
The first thing he noticed was that Imelda knew her customers very, very well. Most of them she greeted by name, often, and she already seemed to have orders ready. 

The second thing was that her clientele was composed almost entirely of women, and many of these women came in wearing slacks and buttoned-up shirts, to leave with rustling plastic garment bags or brown paper parcels containing immaculate suits or shirts or trousers. The first time he’d gone in, the only dress in the whole place had been the one Imelda had been wearing. 

He had seen two or three delicate-looking men come in, beautiful young things--though of course to him, anyone under sixty was young, and most of them were probably in their early thirties. He knew business couldn’t be so quiet, but figured that he WAS coming in at lunchtime or usually after closing, so of course he wouldn’t see too many people.  
He thought about all of this in a roundabout way as he stood there on the doormat; the place was empty except for Imelda, and blessedly warm. There was a smell of cedar and camphor and, beneath that, the scent of lilacs. 

He was fussing with his gloves, trying uselessly to shuck one off without setting his portfolio case down, when he heard the door open, the bells tinkling.

“Excuse me,” a voice behind him said, an he tried not to jump.  
Imelda was chuckling, though.  
“Well, hello, Frankie! I wasn’t expecting you so early.”

Giles turned slowly as the door jingled shut, bringing in a final gust of cold air. He met eyes with a tall Asian woman with hair parted over one arched eyebrow and slicked back so severely it looked painted-on; she was wearing a trench-coat over a suit composed of a jacket with lapels so sharp he could have cut himself on them, cigarette-legged trousers, and a pair of Chelsea boots. The entire outfit was austere, almost funereal black, relieved only by the flashing silver cuff-links he noticed when she finished hanging her coat on the rack beside the door. Upon closer inspection he could see they were tiny silver skulls with rhinestones in the eye-sockets.

“Frankie, this is Giles,” Imelda said.  
Frankie gave him an up-and-down look, clearly unimpressed, and Giles felt equally embarrassed and confused.

“Giles, this is Frankie. Don’t mind each other.” she said. The heavy fabric sample catalogue’s pages made a noise like clapping hands as she flipped back to a marked page. “Giles is the artist I was telling you about, saving us from having to reuse those dreadful paper screens from a few years back.”

“Hm,” Frankie said. She kicked slush from her boots onto the mat and then strode past Giles, stepping up into the area behind the countertop.  
“Frankie is my fabric buyer and inventory manager,” Imelda said.  
“For a moment I was afraid you were going to say he was a customer,” Frankie said. “I was going to say that we’re running a business here, not a charity shop.”  
“Well, pardon me, but we can’t all afford to go around dressed to the nines and ready to hop into the first available hearse,” Giles said, before he could stop himself.

Frankie stared at him with wide eyes for a long moment, before bursting into laughter.  
Imelda looked between the two of them, giving Giles a kindly look, as if to tell him not to panic; she was always like that.  
“You’re all right, Giles! Imelda’s right, you did save us. Those other backdrops were…”  
“Well, I’m sure he did his best,” Imelda said, a bit hastily.  
Frankie snickered into one hand. She said nothing else, though, instead going and opening a door Giles hadn’t noticed an disappearing into a side room. 

Giles set up to work on the fresh backdrop stands, spreading out the old oiled canvas tarp he’d brought earlier and setting up the first of the screens. Imelda had explained it already; it w to be a forest scene, something alpine with a lot of pines and firs, as the holidays bore down upon them and people would be out looking for good coats and nice winter accessories.  
He got so wrapped up in the work that he didn’t even hear Imelda calling him until her hand was literally on his shoulder, gently tapping.

“Giles? I was wondering if you’d like to have dinner with us,” Imelda was saying.  
“Dinner! Oh, goodness, what time is it?”  
“A little after six,” Imelda said, smiling. “There are sandwiches.”  
“Oh! Well, thank you.” and then, because he had manners and he strongly believed Dimitri would have wanted him to, he said, “I’ve brought some coffee, if you have cups.”

While they ate, they talked. Giles was almost embarrassingly grateful for friendly conversation, but tried not to be too obvious about it.  
Frankie had an absolutely stunning, an very morbid sense of fashion, and a razor-sharp wit to go with it; they sat with an issue of Vogue open between them, Frankie sometimes discussing the outfits in the spreads, but more often than not dissecting them viciously. Imelda was more staid and classical in her tastes, but Giles already knew she had a surgeon’s eye for detail, and was dismissive of anything too twee or obviously faddish.  
Since they seemed occupied and he didn’t want to interrupt too much, he pulled out his sketchbook.

Giles’s mind wandered often when he was at work, but always to pleasant places. Part of him wondered what it was that Dimitri did all day, back at home cooped up in the tiny apartment.  
He an Bernard had spent a particularly taxing weekend together t a rented cabin, towards the end of things, when Giles was frantically trying anything he could to keep the other man’s interest.  
This was how he passed his days, while in his scattered free moments his sketchbooks began to fill up with sketches of the Russian doctor. 

He’d asked him, early on, not wanting to do anything sneaky and risk either making the other man anxious or annoyed. Dimitri had said yes, on the condition that he be allowed to see the drawings at any time, an destroy them if he thought either he or Giles were in danger. Giles ha thought that was fair, an agreed--people had crumpled up copies of his work n throw it way every day, without even thinking it WAS art, for years. At least his drawings of Dimitri’s drawings would be real, as would the reasons for possibly destroying them--and not advertisements for snack cakes, which inevitably got tossed out with the Sunday night trash, or used to line bird-cages. 

His favorites were all the most mundane ones: Dimitri with an unlit cigarette perched on his lip, ironing a pair pf pants with a kind of scientific attention to detail that even Giles rarely gave his own clothes; Dimitri standing with his weight canted on one hip, stirring a pot on the stove an talking to him. His most recent was Dimitri standing at the sink in his shirtsleeves, washing dishes. In the late afternoon light, he looked like an old saint washing his hands in the font at a church, an Giles had shaded the rest of the dimmed kitchenette around him in subdued shadows accordingly. 

Giles had been a bit too obvious, and Dimitri’s eyes had flashed in recognition. He’d had his hands in the sink washing dishes, at the time.  
“Drawing me again?” he’d asked, but in a teasing tone.  
Giles had pressed the sketchbook to his chest, nerves making his heart jackhammer a few times, painfully, before he swallowed and spoke. “Yes.”  
Dimitri had wipe his hands on his apron and made his way over, leaning against chairs and the back of the couch for support as he walked.  
“Can I see?” he’d asked.

Giles had turned the sketchbook over carefully, slowly, not knowing what his reaction would be. He didn’t imagine that secret agents were very big fans of people drawing them, even if the people in question were old artists who’d seen better days, who on a bad day couldn't even GIVE his work away.

Dimitri’s face went open with honest delight, and then his eyes went soft and crinkled into crow’ feet at the edges. He gently touched one corner of the sketchbook’s page.  
“My mother used to stand like this when she washed dishes,” he’d murmured, a little. “Our kitchen window overlooked our shared back yard, where the neighbors to our right--the Tyrtovs--hung their laundry, and our neighbors to our left--the Levys--used to grow cabbages and roses. But the window wasn't over the sink; it was on the wall, to the right, so when the sun came through…” and he’d listened as Dimitri described his mother’s kitchen, a few delicate thing about his family's home in Minsk.

“Oh, have you brought more of your personal work? I was just mentioning to Frankie the other day…” Imelda’s words came to him as if from a distance; Giles blinked a few times, coming back to the present with an almost physical jerk. He looked up and almost flinched; they were both looking at him and his sketchbook with interest.  
“Can we have a look?” Frankie said.  
“Well, it’s really nothing special, but I suppose…”

Frankie was the type of woman he’d always been a little bit afraid of; so, equally because he wanted to prove to himself that she wold not, in fact, try to take a bite out of him or drink his blood, he nodded once, an let her slide it away from him on the table. 

They said nothing at first while they were flipping through the sketchbook, past pages of tasteful (and rather deliberately bland) formal nudes, and draped figures, all of people of different genders. There were clothed studies as well, but he was perfectly aware that most of the things in that sketchbook were prim as daisies. This wasn’t even the book that was stuffed full of little doodles of Dimitri puttering around the apartment.  
Then, “This isn’t the one you brought the first time, is it?” Imelda asked.  
“Er--no. That’s one of my other ones.”

A look passed between the two of them and Giles felt a chasm open up just in front of his toes--had he misjudged everything? The suits, the sharp-dressed women (and occasional delicate-looking man) who made up the shop’s exclusive clientele? 

They looked at him, then, and when both women smiled, Giles felt his soul settle back into his body, and the urge to faint bleeding away.  
“Giles Dupont, right? I knew I remembered your name from somewhere,” Frankie said.  
Giles was pleased for all of two seconds, before realizing that the only place his name had appeared publically was in the newspaper, after the police raid on a certain bar where he was arrested for the first and only time. Even that, however, had been decades ago; he wondered how she would have known. 

Giles felt a lash of shame so complete it came almost like a physical pain.  
He hadn’t been in the greatest place emotionally, when he’d begun spening so many of his nights drinking and flirting at bars. Towards the end, it was mostly drinking, and he was not proud to remember that when the police had raided the bar that night, he’d been so drunk he couldn’t run--could barely stand, in fact, and the cops had thrown him down, cuffed him, and dragged him blubbering and pleading into the police wagon. 

He’d spent the ride to the station weeping an wringing his cuffed hans behin his back; across from him there was a stone-faced young man wearing a full face of makeup and a ruffled silk shirt with pink and ornge flowers on it. The young man’s nose had been bleeding with the steadiness of a dripping tap, in big, waxy droplets that ran down his lips and chin and down to stain the shirt. 

He remembered only fits and snatches after that--the cops’ sneering fces as they corralled them into a cell; the glring, flat white lights at the station. The young man, screaming that they were people, not animals, and they had rights. 

His own searing headche the next day, waking up mercifully not on a bench in the station cell, but at his best friend Dorothy’s house. The memory that Bernie hadn’t even called to check on him afterwards was just twisting the knife. 

Giles came back to the present to a roiling stomach and shaking hands. Without thinking, he’d begun wiping his hands on his pants legs; he forced himself to stop, hoping it hadn’t been too noticeable. 

“Those fucking pigs are nothing but power-crazed extortionists. They do the same thing in San Francisco, too, unless you happen to know which man to pay to keep your doors open. And even then, half the time they take the bribe and kick your doors in anyway.” her voice was hard and sardonic.

Imelda patted Frankie’s hand gently; the taller woman sighed and tried to smooth the scowl off her face.  
“We’re Daughters of Bilitis, ourselves,” Imelda said, finally.  
For once, Giles’s runaway mouth couldn’t catch up with his brain. “Daughters of…?”  
They exchanged another look, before both of them smiled at him.  
“We’ll get you a magazine.”

So after that, he was comfortable at work, as well--no awkward water-cooler talk, no pretense at caring about football or baseball or boxing. There were no conversations that weren’t full of sharp edges that always had a danger of cutting him deep, even when the others talking were oblivious to it.


	10. Searching for a Sign of Remembrance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zelda goes to visit Dimitri! They talk over tea and cookies. We see more of Zelda's home life. Brewster is himself; Zelda is sad about that. Zelda makes up her mind about something.   
> Is it worse to miss someone who is dead, or just gone?

Zelda’s feet hurt so bad she was outright limping by the time she got home.  
She found Brewster asleep in his armchair, the TV guide splayed on the floor by his chair.  
The house reeked with a queasy overcooked cabbage smell; she supposed he had forgotten to take the greens off the stove like she’d asked, and had just left them on the back burner all night.

She toed off her shoes at the door, wincing in mingled pain and relief as her stocking-feet met the linoleum.  
She groaned softly as she bent over to pick up her shoes, then quietly walked, shoes in hand, into the kitchen. 

A large stainless steel stockpot was on a back eye on the stove, with jets of steam rattling loose from under the dome of its lid. She’d been right about her guess; the head was down so low the fire was nothing but a fuzzy-looking blue ring around the stove’s eye.  
She turned it off, frowning.  
“Well, at least I made ‘em good and soupy this time.” 

She gave Brewster a sidelong glance, feeling frustration knife into her chest and belly. She felt hot all over, despite the chill she’d just been out in.  
“That man would probably keep his ass in that chair til the whole house went up round him,” she muttered.

She lifted the lid off the pot n gave the greens a sniff; there was still broth left in the pot, stewed down to a delicious dark green liquor. Here an there among the dark green leaves, chunks of baby-pink ham bobbed like little corks. 

Up close, the greens ha a grassy, vegetal smell, undercut by the sharpness of vinegar. She sighed in pleasure, then settled the lid back on the pot, an went back to the bedroom to wash up an change. 

Brewster was awake when she came back, showered and in a house-dress and house robe. He was sitting in his chair with a bowl of greens, watching TV; she started to say hello before glancing into the little kitchen. Her eyes fell on the countertop and she saw the splashes of broth an the puddle he’d left when he’d dipped his bowl of greens up.  
She sighed in helpless frustration, and stomped into the kitchen to yank open a drawer. She pulled a towel out and wet it at the sink. 

As she savagely wrung it out, she said, “Hello and good morning to you, too! You couldn’t use a spoon rest?”  
He made a noise around a mouthful of food, and she sighed again, biting her lips to keep from saying anything else.

She had baked a pan of cornbread last night and put it in the oven, and which was fortunately spared from Brewster’s negligence. She dipped herself up a bowl of greens and cut herself some of the cornbread, and very pointedly took it to the kitchen table, where she sat and shifted in the chair, knowing it would creak.

Brewster’s response to the chair’s noise was to half-turn his head and say, “Woman, if you don’t quit fussin’ with that bad chair! I can’t hear the news!”  
She stopped for a moment, then set her fork down. She sighed and decided to try something else. 

“Can’t you see the TV from in here?” she said, cajoling. “Don’t you want to eat at the table so you don’t have to worry about spilling all over the place?”  
“Uh-uh. Chairs too stiff,” he said.

A moment later he was smacking and slurping around the sound of the morning news, oblivious to the rest of the entire world. If she’d climbed up on the table and done a fan dance with a napkin, he would have glanced at her once and grunted.  
That didn’t matter, now. 

One of the benefits of having a husband who paid you less attention than a house lamp was that she was free to do what she liked with her own time. Mostly that translated to reading, since of course Brewster wasn’t about to share the television, and their radio had mysteriously broken one day when he had had some friends over during a baseball game; apparently there ha been some very heated words exchanged, and the radio had ‘ended up busted’.  
She glared at him sidelong, brushing crumbs from her fingertips onto a napkin.  
Well, she decided, if he wasn’t going to pay her any attention, then there ws no reason to sit stewing over it. She got up, padded to the bedroom, and came back with an old book she’d kept in a box in the closet.

It was a sign language textbook for teachers, one she had scarcely opened in years.  
As she took it back to the table she remembered first buying it; the happiness she’d felt, when she’d been sure she had a supportive husband, an ws about to step into a career.  
Mournful, bitter thoughts about wht happened instead crowded close in her memory, but she tamped them down. 

In the months and weeks since Elisa’s leaving, she’d had a lot of time to think.  
Elisa ha her fish-man; Giles and Dimitri had each other; and she had Brewster, and _had_ had him for all those long, pointless years. The time stretched out behind her like a blur, sped up like a high-speed gimmick in a movie.  
She forced herself to open the book beside her plate, picking a page at random.  
The thoughts kept going, like a dog digging a hole.

All this, for a marriage to a man who wouldn’t even turn his armchair sideways or drag the damn thing to the table so they could eat face-to-face.  
Sometimes his carelessness felt like a slap. Other times it felt like a warning, like a sign flashing up out of the fog that she should have seen before.

For so long, she had told herself she ought to be content, at least. He was lazy and could barely be bothered to say three things to her at a time, but he never hit her or took money out of her purse, or tried to boss her around.

It occurred to her that these niceties didn’t mean anything, since she always gave him money whenever he asked anyway, and he didn’t boss her around because he barely spoke to her.  
She ha married a taciturn, easygoing man and ended up with a man who acted like moss on a log, and who paid her as much attention as moss would have, too. 

With these thoughts plaguing her, she ate in silence, feeling despondent and frustrated by turns; once she finished, she put her dishes in the sink and dragged herself into the darkened bedroom. Brewster still hadn’t really spoken to her by the time she had her hair in rollers and her scarf on. She wasn’t sure why she had hoped he would break his routine for once, but he didn’t.  
She felt strangely relieved, without being able to out her finger on why.

Alone in the bedroom, she turned back the brown quilt with its white and yellow stars--one of the few mementos she had from the mother she had never met--and lay down, to sink slowly into a thin sleep interrupted by bursts of noise from the TV. But she could not rest; after tossing and turning for awhile, she finally got up an turned on a lamp. The textbook lured her back in, with a potent mix of longing and nostalgia. She decided it was better than lying there missing a man who was sitting in the next room, practically ignoring her. 

~

When she woke up the next day it was already late in the afternoon. Brewster was making an abominable racket in the kitchen, an she felt a jolt of annoyance; she hadn't set breakfast out, and he was probably tearing up the kitchen trying to make himself something simple, like scramble eggs.  
She rolled over, sighing, and closed her eyes a minute. 

She felt tired, so tired; it was like she was sinking into the mattress, her body dissolving into it. Lord, she thought to herself, Why can’t that man just make himself some grits and be QUIET so I can rest?  
She’d been on her feet, walking, bending, scrubbing, and mopping almost nonstop every day for a whole week. He went once a week to the unemployment office to pick up his measly little check, which disappeared almost as fast s he got it; he’d cash it and then call his friends and gamble it away on a boxing match or game of dominoes. 

There was a crash from the kitchen, followed by cursing. She heard hard, uneven footsteps crossing the kitchen floor. He didn’t come to try to get her up, but she couldn’t even put that down to kindness; she’d had to sit him down and have a long, hard talk with him after the first few times she came home from hard shifts an he woke her up out of a dead sleep, expecting her to make him lunch. 

She had no intention of getting up and going in there to cook him breakfast. It was her day off and she intended to actually enjoy it, for once.  
She sighed and curled up more comfortably in the blankets, and made up her mind to get up after he stopped messing around in the kitchen. 

~

The bus that went the closest to Giles’s (and Elisa’s) place had the rudest driver she’d ever had to deal with. And she’d visited family in Texas; she knew from rude bus drivers.  
There was the indignity of paying, then having to shuffle to the back, past white people who either glared daggers t her or blithely ignored her; but this was on top of the driver giving her a look like she smelled like unwashed feet or shit, and then jerking the bus into gear before she was even in a seat. She stumbled and almost fell and dropped her basket, and had to resist the urge to turn and glare at him. Instead she stumbled down the aisle, trying to be careful, not able to even grab most of the seats as they were occupied. Finally she could sit down.

An elderly woman in a gray maid’s uniform and black coat sat across the aisle from her, her eyes shut and her hands folded in her lap; she wore white cotton gloves that somehow stood out as even starker against the boiled-icing-white of her apron.  
The driver swung the bus around and the poor old woman’s head snapped down, then back up, and she opened her eyes and blinked a few times.

When they hit a pothole and she braced for it beforehand, Zelda realized this was her regular bus route; the driver probably always drove the way he did, knowing that being in the back was bumpy as hell.  
The annoyance came as hot as a spurt of blood. For once she wished she could have given him a piece of her mind--she’d really let him have it. This was tempered by the same feeling of helplessness that always came up in the space after those sudden bolts of anger--the knowledge that even a polite request for him to avoid hitting every damn pothole like it was his job, would be met with rudeness or cruelty; or he might even decide to put her off the bus altogether. 

She wished, with a sudden white-hot fury, that Elisa was still there--because at least then they could have gone window-shopping for shoes together, or back to her place to play cards to take Zelda’s mind off it. She missed Elisa’s easy, sly sense of humor, knowing the way she would have signed something snide and hilarious about the rude driver--probably right to his face. Zelda had developed a stone-cold poker face from the number of times Elisa would sign something like, ‘He smells like all he does is _read_ packages of soap’, and ‘I bet he’s taking a correspondence course on etiquette. He should ask for a refund’, and she had had to carefully compose her face to avoid bursting into laughter in public, at a white man’s expense. 

But Elisa wasn’t here to make the situation tolerable with a knowing look an a joke.  
Zelda had expected, somehow, that things would get easier as more time passed.  
She had been wrong. 

Now with no one to talk to, the unspoken words ran in a constant loop in her mind, with her always. The things she wanted to tell Elisa, knowing it would make her laugh, or she’d have something interesting to say about it; the observations, the questions. Losing her best friend was like losing one of her senses--memory, maybe, or voice. Now she chatted with Duane and the others and took occasional smoke breaks with them; but there was no one person to fill Elisa’s shift, and they’d been changing her work partner every other week. 

She knew it was going to be hard, but this was a kind of grief that came not just with disbelief, but hope--possibly delusional--that maybe one day Elisa might come back.  
She clutched the basket in her lap tighter, pursing her lips; a moment later she reached out to hold onto the backrest of the seat in front of herself, to brace herself like the old woman. With her other arm, she cradled the basket against her chest, off her lap.  
She would be damned if some ass was going to ruin the cookies she’d taken all that time to make. 

~

She knocked on the door three times and then stepped back, surreptitiously feeling the cookies through the yellow-and-white gingham kitchen towel she’d covered the basket with.  
The cookies felt intact, not a single broken or crumbled edge. She felt a little victorious surge of happiness. 

After a few more moments, the door opened a crack; she took one step forward, to let him hear her heels on the floorboards so he’d feel calm. Then he opened the door wider and she stepped over the threshold into Giles’s apartment.  
Dimitri said, “Good afternoon!”

“Good afternoon! Oh, lord, you don’t know how glad I am to be on solid ground again! That man who drives the ten o’clock number 2 is a fool. Drives like he ain’t got the common sense he was born with--hel _lo_ , kitty-cat!” she paused to bend and stroke the proffered back of the cat arching its back near her leg, then continued, “Seemed like he hit every pothole in the road! I started off worrying about my cookies, but by the end I was worried about my poor neck…”  
Dimitri laughed as he took the basket from her so that she could take off her coat.  
“Don’t peek! I got to feelin’ down, so I made something special.” 

“Oh! Now I’m curious. But, I shall be on my best behavior.” He set the basket on the table, but she caught the way his eyes snapped to it before going back to her face.  
She laughed. “Aren’t you always?”  
He helped her off with her coat and then hung it on Giles’s coat-rack.  
“Other people would disagree.”

“’Other people’ need to mind their business. Mm! It’s nice and warm in here...so good to be out of the cold!”  
She saw that there was a copy of the Joy of Cooking open on the kitchen table, along with a scattering of gray-bound books from Giles’s bookshelves. The cats--the less shy of the three--were emerging from their various napping places, but they were too well-mannered to jump up on the table and sniff at the basket. The one currently standing beside her and staring up at her meowed and reached out with a paw as if waving. She laughed and bent over again to scratch them behind the ears. 

The movie downstairs had a quick, swingy soundtrack, with a lot of trumpets and a good beat to whatever song was currently playing. She wondered if Dimitri and Giles ever bothered with the radio, or if they’d just walk around, listening to whatever movie was showing downstairs. 

“I just put the kettle on for some tea,” Dimitri said. “I hope you don’t mind the wait.”  
Zelda didn’t; they sat down and she flicked the corner of the towel back, revealing the cookies she’d brought. They were humble-looking, pale sandy-colored and smelling heavily of vanilla and nutmeg.

Dimitri took one bite and chewed, his face first going blank and then intense with concentration. He was staring _really_ hard at the basket; so hard that Zelda burst into laughter.  
“You can eat as many as you want; I didn’t make ‘em for decorations.”  
“They’re like…butter and nutmeg and…” he trailed off, shaking his head. “What are these?”  
“These,” Zelda said, stacking three on her own plate, “Are tea-cakes. My aunt’s special recipe.”  
“They are fantastic. Like a slice of cake with a wafer-thin crust. I can’t begin to describe it,” he said, gesturing. 

She smiled, preening a little under the praise; but the good feeling was short-lived.  
He must have noticed the way her face fell, because he put down the cookie he’d been eating an folded his hand on the tabletop, looking at _her_ intensely, now. But his eyes were searching and sympathetic, as always.

“You said you’d made them because you’d gotten to feeling down. Is…everything all right? I don’t mean to pry,” he said. His voice was gentle.  
She looked away from him, at the rest of Giles’s apartment, at the cats sunning themselves under the window, the stacks of books everywhere. There was a drawing of Dimitri set up on Giles’s easel, laughing with a skillet in one hand. In the drawing, he was wearing an apron with a lacy trim over a fuzzy-looking sweater. She was still barely used to seeing him with a beard, so the man in the drawing looked like a complete stranger. 

She had figured out that Giles was gay a long time ago, and had thought nothing of it at all. He was a friend of Elisa’s; he was witty, a bit fussy, forgetful, and a very sweet man. The fact that he’d been willing to help them with Elisa’s scheme to free the fish-man had solidified her good opinion of him, and nothing any hellfire and brimstone preacher, or crooked politician could say would change her mind. 

Seeing such an obvious sign of their happiness gave her a pang of joy, mingled with bittersweet envy. If she could have drawn, the only things she’d be able to do would be draw page after page of Brewster in his damned chair. 

She came back to the present to see Dimitri still sitting there, looking even more worried now.  
“You know, I never thought how true it’d be, how much you miss someone when they’re gone. Sometimes I forget she ain’t here anymore and I see something funny and think to myself, Wait ‘til Elisa gets a load of this!” She chuckled, but her eyes were stinging and she knew her lips were trembling. “The other day it lasted all the way ‘til I was in the building, waiting in line. I kept looking back at the elevator doors, waiting to see her step out and come rushing over. Yolanda hollered at me for holding up the line, same as always,” Zelda said. Her heart felt like something cold and blue in her chest, threatening to burst or overflow.  
Dimitri was looking at her with his sad, thoughtful eyes. “I understand exactly what you mean,” he said softly. 

He did not press; she liked that about him, that he was an open listener, without being nosy. She sighed again and then dabbed the corners of her eyes with a napkin.  
“The funny thing is, I know she’s not dead! I know it. I saw ‘em jump off the pier myself. But…it don’t mean she ain’t gone. I don’t know what hurts worse, wanting her to come back or knowing she _shouldn’t_ , ‘cause of how much trouble she’d be in.” she paused a moment, then snorted and _laughed_ as a bizarre thought surfaced in her mind.  
“What’s so funny?”  
“I just remembered she owes me two dollars. The last time we played cards, I won…” Zelda laughed again, but more tears escaped. She wiped her eyes again. 

Dimitri chuckled a little, too. “Sometimes, the things we remember about people seem strange. And, of course, when we remember them. Memory itself is a strange thing. And the things we often remember are the small, intimate things.”  
She nodded. “My husband pitched a fit when I said she could pay me back later. Said I wasn't never gonna see that money again.” she paused, staring off into space. “Maybe he was right.”  
Then, bitterly, she continued, “It’d be the first time in a long time. I was surprised he was even payin’ attention! ‘Course, like I was thinking a little while ago, the whole damn house could burn up around that man an he wouldn’t even notice. Long as the TV was the last thing to go, he’d just stay parked right there in that armchair. Never should’ve bought that ugly old thing. He spends more time there than he does at the table or in bed!”

Dimitri made a sympathetic noise. “For some people, closeness brings complacency. I’m very sorry, though--you don’t deserve to be ignored in your own home, least of all by your husband.”  
“You can sacrifice so much, and then figure out too late that they never gon’ give it back. --The love, the loyalty, the hard work,” Zelda said. “’ _Specially_ the hard work. Goodness _knows_ the number of times I come home from work, feet sore, stinkin’ like eight kinds of chemicals--and can’t even get a ‘How was work?’ or ‘How you doin’?’” she shook her head.  
“And it ain’t like I didn’t try! But there ain’t a pie recipe or pretty dress in the world can distract Brewster from a ball game or a boxing match. And he calls himself watching the news at night. Hmph!” she shook her head, taking another cookie.

The kettle began to whistle from the stove; Dimitri got up, carefully situated the crutch under one arm, and then brought it back to the table.  
“You’re just now starting to use crutches? Shouldn’t you have had those this whole time? Did they--don’t tell me. They sent you home without ‘em, and told you to just put your feet up?” she went from incredulous to knowingly scornful in a matter of seconds; Dimitri’s ironic scoff only confirmed her suspicions. 

“They…didn’t directly do so, no,” he said, “But the wait time was too long for me to stay there any longer. Walking unassisted is a struggle, but not impossible.”  
“Has Giles been helpin’ you? Oh, my goodness, why am I asking--that man seem like he’d leave the house with one shoe on and his jacket on inside out…”

Dimitri shook his head, but he was smiling. “Actually, he’s been very kind. He’s a bit absentminded, yes, but…I don’t mind.”  
Zelda listened to all of this with a wide smile. “He’d have to be, for Elisa to like him. She sure can pick ‘em.” She was silent a moment, then a sobering thought came to her. “You really did save his life, you know that? Elisa’s fish-man. Hell, you probably saved all _our_ lives afterwards--you don’t have to tell me any details. I can put a picture together just fine from the way Strick--that man was acting. I think I didn’t get to say it to Elisa--not directly, anyway--so let me say it to you: I’m glad I met you.”  
Then Dimitri looked away, then looked back to her, the tears coming suddenly to his eyes.  
He took his glasses off and wipes his eyes with a napkin. 

“Thank you.” he said. Then, after they both took a moment to dry their eyes, Zelda sighed hard and shifted in her seat.  
“I don’t know what kind of company I’m acting like, coming into somebody’s house and making them all upset--”  
Dimitri made a noise of protest. “I’ve had much worse house-guests than this, since coming to this country.” 

Zelda gave him a shocked look, then shook her head so theatrically that Dimitri had to laugh.  
“You don’t believe me? I wish I could tell you…”

The conversation drifted on, meandering pleasantly. Dimitri made them a pot of tea--some type Zelda had never heard of, which smelled like cloves and orange peels when it brewed. They talked about a lot of nothing--their ridiculous coworkers, travel, cooking recipes. Dimitri had been just about everywhere, it turned out--though most of the places in America he’d been to were so remote that Zelda hadn’t hear of half of them. it was nice to have a conversation that wasn't entirely one-sided, and even nicer to have one with someone as interesting as Dimitri.

Zelda hadn’t realize how starved she’d been for company until she actually had it. It was a struggle to pull herself away to head home, and she dragged her feet as long as she could, waiting until Giles got home and she knew she couldn’t delay going home any longer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Indulging in the REAL Millennial fantasy: having days off that coincide with your friends', so you can go over and hang out whenever you feel like it! Also, having your own apartment instead of one room! Woo! Livin' large, right everybody?


End file.
